Defragmenting the 6LoWPAN Fragmentation Landscape: A Performance Evaluation.

Amaury Bruniaux,Remous-Aris Koutsiamanis,Georgios Z Papadopoulos,Nicolas Montavont

doi:10.3390/s21051711

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has made wireless connectivity ubiquitous and necessary. Extending the IoT to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) places significant demands in terms of reliability on wireless connectivity. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Std 802.15.4-2015 standard was designed in response to these demands, and the IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) adaptation layer was introduced to address (among other issues) its payload size limitations by performing packet compression and fragmentation. However, the standardised method does not cope well with low link-quality situations and, thus, we present the state-of-the-art Forward Error Correction (FEC) methods and introduce our own contribution, Network Coding FEC (NCFEC), to improve performance in these situations. We present and analyse the existing methods as well as our own theoretically, and we then implement them and perform an experimental evaluation using the 6TiSCH simulator. The simulation results demonstrate that when high reliability is required and only low quality links are available, NCFEC performs best, with a trade-off between additional network and computational overhead. In situations where the link quality can be guaranteed to be higher, simpler solutions also start to be feasible, but with reduced adaptation flexibility.

Highlights

As more and more constrained wireless devices are globally connected through the Internet Protocol version 6 (IP V 6) [1], a new paradigm called the Internet of Things (I O T) [2]has emerged
With all fragmentation methods when the packet size is smaller than the Medium Access Control (MAC) Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU), the source node does not proceed with fragmentation and, it transmits the packet directly
With a link quality of 0.65, Minimal Fragment Forwarding (MFF) packets of two fragments are received with a PDRof 77%, whereas with the lightest Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme, XORFEC, the reliability increases up to 87%

Summary

Introduction

As more and more constrained wireless devices are globally connected through the Internet Protocol version 6 (IP V 6) [1], a new paradigm called the Internet of Things (I O T) [2]has emerged. The Industrial Internet of Things (II O T) aims at increasing productivity and efficiency by using I O T devices in order to provide real time monitoring and control, and enabling the automation of production chains. Since losses of data packets could endanger the operation of the production chains, industrial automation networks often require several nines of packet delivery reliability and low latency [3]. Networking protocols dedicated for industrial networks have to ensure a sufficient Quality of Service (Q O S), especially because low-power wireless communications are lossy by nature. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Std 802.15.4-2015 standard was published in 2016, and its Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) aims at fulfilling such requirements by organising the communications of multi-hop networks with scheduling based on time and frequency. For each transmission and reception in the network, there is a dedicated cell composed of a timeslot and a radio offset, that is translated into radio channel, to avoid potential collisions between simultaneous communications

Methods

Results

Conclusion