Low Power Wireless Personal Area Research Articles

Wireless Sensor Network for Real-time Flood Monitoring Based on 6loWPAN Communication Standard

Riverine flood is a major disaster faced by most countries and has significant adverse effect on long term economic growth of affected regions and their environments. Several systems have previously employed different technologies to monitor riverine flood but are expensive with low accuracy and consumes high amount of energy. In this paper, we proposed an energy efficient and accurate flood monitoring system. The system leverages on Internet Protocol Version 6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6loWPAN) technology to construct a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) comprising of two XM1000 motes and a rule-base water level monitoring application. The motes were configured using NesC programming for flood monitoring with Basestation and water level sensing applications. The water level sensing mote samples and transmits real-time water level information to the Basestation mote which interfaces with a rule-based water level monitoring application. The application compares current water level with a predetermined threat level and alerts relevant agencies when flood is imminent via an email. The results obtained from the emulation of the developed system showed that, it achieved an accuracy of 95.3% in water level monitoring with a Mean Squared Error of 5.1. The power consumed in transmitting a packet of 2 bytes payload plus other overhead was 0.4µJ and 0.0396mJ with and without 6loWPAN configuration respectively.

Titan TTCN-3 Based Test Framework for Resource Constrained Systems

Wireless communication systems more and more become part of our daily live. Especially with the Internet of Things (IoT) the overall connectivity increases rapidly since everyday objects become part of the global network. For this purpose several new wireless protocols have arisen, whereas 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) can be seen as one of the most important protocols within this sector. Originally designed on top of the IEEE802.15.4 standard it is a subject to various adaptions that will allow to use 6LoWPAN over different technologies; e.g. DECT Ultra Low Energy (ULE). Although this high connectivity offers a lot of new possibilities, there are several requirements and pitfalls coming along with such new systems. With an increasing number of connected devices the interoperability between different providers is one of the biggest challenges, which makes it necessary to verify the functionality and stability of the devices and the network. Therefore testing becomes one of the key components that decides on success or failure of such a system. Although there are several protocol implementations commonly available; e.g., for IoT based systems, there is still a lack of according tools and environments as well as for functional and conformance testing. This article describes the architecture and functioning of the proposed test framework based on Testing and Test Control Notation Version 3 (TTCN-3) for 6LoWPAN over ULE networks.

Development of 6LoWPAN in Embedded Wireless System

In the proposed system, implementation of the low power sensor nodes is proposed. 6LoWPAN is an acronym of IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Network was developed to enable the Wireless Embedded Internet by simplifying IPv6 functionality, defining very compact header formats and taking the nature of wireless networks into account. Our solution contains two types of nodes Wireless Sensor Node and Border Router/Gateway Node. Wireless Sensor Node: These nodes have sensors integrated and are used to gather the information and send to the Border Router/Gateway Node. They create a mesh network among them, forwarding the packets of other nodes in order to make the information reach the Border Router/Gateway Node. Each Wireless Sensor Node is equipped with a 6LoWPAN (802.15.4) radio, sensors and a battery. It can be either a microcontroller based or Linux based embedded platforms. Border Router/Gateway Node: This node takes the information sent by the Wireless Sensor Nodes and sends it to the Tunneling IPv4 / IPv6 server by using the Ethernet IPv4 interface. Each Border Router/Gateway Node is equipped with a Linux based Single Board Computer, 6LoWPAN (802.15.4) radio and an Ethernet interface and a battery.

Collaborative Key Exchange System Based on Chinese Remainder Theorem in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs), in the next generation of wireless sensor networks, represent an emerging field which can be integrated with Internet technology. Security is one of the most important issues in 6LoWPANs given the vulnerability to security threats from Internet and the inherent constraints such as bandwidth, processing power, memory, and energy. Despite limited resources, data security for nodes adds an additional heavy cost by using various security schemes. Moreover, there is no standard approach to provide the end-to-end security in 6LoWPANs. In this work, we first axed our research to propose a new end-to-end security scheme for IP enabled sensor networks to optimize battery energy consumption and then we adapted the Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) to wireless sensor networks while taking into consideration the scarce resources. Hence a novel Cooperative Key Exchange System (CKES) has been proposed in this paper based on Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) which has also been implemented in NS2 to analyze energy consumption compared to IKEv2.

Web and WSN’S Integration: The Web of Things (WoT)

The novel trend of IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) has enlivened the compromise of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Smart objects with the ubiquitous Internet. Meanwhile, the Term CoAP stands for Constrained Application Protocol has made it possible to bestow resource obliged devices all along RESTful web services functionalities and thus to organize Wireless Sensor Networks and smart things or objects with the Web. The exercise of Web services on top of IP based Wireless Sensor Networks holds up the software reusability and reductions the capriciousness of the application change. This exertion spotlight RESTful Wireless Sensor Networks. It depicts CoAP, highlights the principal appears differently in relation to Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and reports the delayed consequences of a fundamental investigation exhibiting the benefits of CoAP in regards to compel usage diverged from Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). We have depicted the arrangement and progression of an end-toend IP based auxiliary arranging (architecture) joining a CoAP more than 6LowPAN Contiki based Wireless Sensor Networks with a Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over IP based application. The application consents a customer to get to Wireless Sensor Networks data particularly from a Web program.

Efficient HIP-based approach to ensure lightweight end-to-end security in the internet of things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging and promising paradigm that can be considered as an extension of the Internet to interconnect all kinds of smart objects around us to provide a pervasive (or ubiquitous) information access. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), as a vital component of the IoT, allow the representation of the dynamic characteristics of the real world in the Internet's virtual world. Thus, sensor nodes are henceforth considered as Internet hosts and, may act as web servers or clients. The maturity of the Internet of Things is arguably linked to communications security and end-users privacy protection. However, the material and technological heterogeneity as well as the asymmetric nature of the communications between the sensor nodes and the classical Internet hosts are making security a challenging problem. In this context, many recent works focus on leveraging IP-based security protocols for IoT, after adapting them to WSN's constraints commonly by messages compression or by computational-load distribution techniques. In this paper we propose a 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) compression for the header of HIP (Host Identity Protocol) packets, as well as, an adapted distribution scheme of security computational load in HIP Base EXchange (HIP-BEX). To achieve extremely lightweight end-to-end (E2E) security, we combine both proposed compression and distribution models for HIP in WSN's side, in the IoT. The evaluation results show clearly that the proposed solution, named Compressed and Distributed HIP (CD-HIP), is sufficiently energy efficient with a slight security establishment delay, and a good level of compatibility with the standard HIP.

On the Need of Source Address for Route-Error Delivery in 6LoWPAN

Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs) comprise devices that conform to the IEEE standard 802.15.4. These networks need to be connected with other wireless and wired networks in order to maximize the utilization of information and other resources which are mainly associated with the Internet Protocol (IP)-based networks. The transmission of IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs), requires a fragmentation and reassembly layer that also carries out header compression for transmission efficiency. The existing proposed header format includes the originator’s address in adaptation layer, to ensure along with other issues, that in case of a link failure, route error messages are delivered back to the originator. We propose the Unicast Back-Propagation Mechanism (UBP) that delivers the Route Error Message (RERR) to the source even without having the originator’s address in 6LoWPAN adaptation layer packet format. We make use of MAC layer address for sending the RERR to the previous hop node, back tracking the route hop by hop, eventually to the source. The simulation results show that our solution provides considerable header compression yet shows better diagnostic performance as the RERR delivery mechanism in standard ad-hoc routing.

Feasibility and performance evaluation of a 6LoWPAN‐enabled platform for ubiquitous healthcare monitoring

AbstractTechnology has revolutionized medical practices by enabling more convenient and non‐intrusive monitoring of patient's health, leading to next generation ubiquitous healthcare (u‐healthcare). The exploitation of the Internet protocol version 6 addressing space along with the miniaturization of electronic devices has fostered providing interoperability and connectivity of wearable sensor devices in wireless body area networks to the Internet of Things. In this paper, we propose to integrate the IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) to the u‐healthcare monitoring system architecture. The main objective is to study the feasibility of the 6LoWPAN‐enabled platform in real‐world scenarios dealing with medical data. The performance evaluation of this platform is carried out initially through simulations using OMNet++ and then supported by an experimental study using sensor motes and a customized micro‐computing unit. Performance metrics such as throughput, end‐to‐end delay, packet error rate, and energy consumption are investigated under acute health conditions, where patient's health information has to be sent continuously and at maximum rate to the care provider. The obtained results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN solution fulfills the main quality of service requirements of u‐healthcare applications. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Research on seamless mobility handover for 6LoWPAN wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a seamless mobility handover scheme (SMH) for IPv6 over low power wireless personal area networks wireless sensor networks. In SMH, the routing of the control messages for the mobility handover is performed in the link layer and is automatically achieved through the IPv6-access-node trees, so the mobility handover cost is reduced and the delay is shortened. SMH proposes the hierarchical IPv6 address structure for sensor nodes which effectively shortens the length of an IPv6 address and reduces the transmission cost. In SMH, a mobile sensor node does not need a care-of address during the mobility handover process, so it does not need to perform the binding operation between its home address and care-of address. As a result, the mobility handover cost is reduced and the delay is shortened. The paper analyzes the performance parameters of SMH, and the data results show that SMH reduces the mobility handover cost and shortens the delay.

Secure collaborative system in heterogenous wireless sensor networks

The IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs) have turned out to be one of the most emerging field in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) which can be integrated with Internet technology. 6LoWPAN network consists of heterogeneous wireless sensors which have high resource-constraints such as bandwidth, processing power, memory, energy, etc. The resource-constraints put forth many challenges to apply the available standard security protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS), Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2), etc., for the interconnection of Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (HWSNs) with Internet. To overcome these situations, the researchers aimed to reinforce and adapt the end-to-end security between Internet and the IP enabled sensor networks. The above mentioned security protocols are not modified at the Internet end point in HWSNs. Hence we are proposing a novel Cooperative Key Exchange System (CKES) by using the concept of Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). We have used NS2 simulator to implement the proposed concept and also compared with IKEv2. All Rights Reserved © 2015 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Centro de Ciencias Aplicadas y Desarrollo Tecnologico. This is an open access item distributed under the Creative Commons CC License BY-NC-ND 4.0.

SPEED-3D: a geographic routing protocol for 6LoWPAN networks

The integration of the wireless sensor network WSN technology in the internet world is a necessary step towards the full accomplishment of the internet of things IoT vision. In order to reach a seamless integration of tiny mote devices in internet, the IPv6 addressing method and communication protocols developed for the IoT must be modified or adapted to match the WSN requirements. This adaptation process is started in the 2007 with the standardisation of the IPv6 protocol over low power wireless personal area networks 6LoWPAN. In such a scenario, we propose SPEED-3D, an extension of the SPEED geographic routing algorithm, adapted to 6LoWPAN networks that caters for 3D routing. SPEED-3D avoids the creation of routing tables, and has a very low memory occupation; it also supports load balancing and flow shaping; finally, thanks to the presented extension, it is able to work seamlessly in a 3D setting e.g., a tall building. In the paper, we first present SPEED-3D in 6LoWPAN networks by detailing the encapsulation of all messages in the IEEE802.15.4 medium access control MAC protocol and the new functionality provided thanks to the IPv6 standard, then we present its implementation on a real-time kernel and its performance in a realistic indoor scenario.

A Review of Network Based Mobility Management Schemes, WSN Mobility in 6LoWPAN Domain and Open Challenges

Wireless Sensor Nodes (SNs) in Internet of Things (IOT), have revolutionized and changed the perspective of internet. With the introduction of IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN), it is possible to connect these constrained devices to IPv6 Networks and transmit IPv6 packets. Mobility of such devices is achieved by deploying/installing them on many mobile (moving) objects including mobile gadgets, physical objects (living or non-living) etc. Therefore it requires sufficient Mobility Management Schemes for data transmission. Host based mobility protocols; MIPv6 and its extensions are not suitable for resource constrained devices. In this paper, our focus is to study PMIPv6 based mobility management and different Scenarios based on it along with sensor’s mobility. Although existing research has made many improvements in terms of HO latency but less attention has paid towards signaling cost and packet loss, particularly in time critical areas. The study provides the complete survey of network based mobility management schemes, 6LoWPAN mobility and challenges associated with them.

Denial-of-Service attacks on 6LoWPAN-RPL networks: Issues and practical solutions

RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-power and lossy networks) is a specific routing protocol designed to optimize 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Network) operation. As 6LoWPAN suffers from resource constraints on battery, processor, memory and bandwidth, it affects the performance of the RPL protocol. From security point of view, this will make RPL vulnerable to several threats directly or indirectly. Thus, cryptographic systems are not sufficient to protect the RPL from internal attacks; a compromised node from the network may cause undesired operation without being detected by these systems. An intrusion detection system (IDS) should be used, but it is not easy given the nature of 6LoWPAN; on a side its resource constraints, and on the other side its opening to the outside world through the Internet. In this paper we focus on denial of service (DoS) attacks, we determine the elements to be taken into account in selecting a compatible IDS and we give some solutions that we consider effective and valid for 6LoWPAN-RPL based networks Keywords: RPL, ROLL, 6LoWPAN, IDS, DoS, Network security.

Design and Implementation of IPv6 Border Router for Wireless Sensor Networks

With the rapid development of Internet of things, IPv6 has been introduced into wireless sensor networks and widely used in many areas. It is significant to develop routing devices to connect wireless sensor networks and the Internet based on IPv6 technology. In this paper, we present a 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) border router scheme. The hardware design and software design are discussed and the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the router scheme. By using the proposed border router, the network can achieve end-to-end communications between 6LoWPAN nodes and IPv6 hosts in a universal method.

PA-NEMO: Proxy Mobile IPv6-aided Network Mobility Management Scheme for 6LoWPAN

The IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN), a special type of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with mobility, has a great potential to be deployed for the convenience of people’s life. In 6LoWPAN, a group of sensor nodes often move together as a whole subset, guiding by a cluster head. Because of the low-power requirements of mobile devices in 6LoWPAN, seeking low cost schemes to manage the mobility of the whole subset is a very essential problem to be solved. To this end, this paper firstly proposes a Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) Aided Network Mobility (NEMO) management scheme, referred to as PA-NEMO, for 6LoWPAN, by combining traditional PMIPv6 with NEMO Basic Support scheme. In the proposed PA-NEMO scheme, the transmission tunnels are established out of the 6LoWPAN area, so the cost of the devices can be greatly reduced. Then, we formulate and analyse the signalling overhead of the proposed PA-NEMO. Finally, some numerical results are presented to show that our proposed PA-NEMO achieves the lowest signalling overhead among existing mobility management schemes. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eee.20.3.3951

An Enhanced Group Mobility Protocol for 6LoWPAN-Based Wireless Body Area Networks

The IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) has attracted lots of attention recently because it can be used for the communications of Internet of things. In this paper, the concept of group-based network roaming in proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) domain is considered in the 6LoWPAN-based wireless body area networks. PMIPv6 is a standard to manage the network-based mobility in all-IP wireless network. However, it does not perform well in group-based body area networks. To further reduce the handoff delay and signaling cost, an enhanced group mobility scheme is proposed in this paper to reduce the number of control messages, including router solicitation and router advertisement messages as opposed to the group-based PMIPv6 protocol. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed handoff scheme can reduce the handoff delay and signaling cost. The packet loss ratio and the overhead can also be reduced.

New Reassembly Buffer Management System in 6LoWPAN

Recently, Internet of Thing (IoT) appears to be a new paradigm for everything to be connected seamlessly to the Internet. One of the standards used to fit the low power devices into IoT is IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor network (WSN). To support IPv6 packet transmission over the IEEE 802.15.4 networks, the IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) adaptation layer is necessary. The 6LoWPAN adaptation layer divides the packet into a number of fragments before it is transmitted. At the receiver, these fragments will be reassembled to become the original packet. However, the existing reassembly process in the adaptation layer fails to consider the irregular arrival sequence of fragments which can cause the packet that has been reassembled to be corrupted. This serious impediment in reassembly mechanism can cause unacceptable packet lost. In this paper, a new reassembly mechanism namely Multi-Reassemblies Buffer Management System (MRBMS) is proposed in the context of providing efficient 6LoWPAN packets reassembly. In this proposed mechanism multiple reassembly buffers are created dynamically such that multiple reassembly sessions can be processed simultaneously. Each reassembly session is responsible for a packet reconstruction. The performance of proposed MR-BMS is compared with RFC 4944-based reassembly mechanism and SICSlowPAN implementation. Results show that the proposed mechanism outperforms RFC 4944-based reassembly mechanism and SICSlowPAN implementation with 121.7% and 16.2% higher packet delivery ratio respectively when packet encountered more fragmentation. Moreover, the proposed MR-BMS has a comparable average energy consumption with other mechanisms.

Beyond 6LoWPAN: Web Services in Wireless Sensor Networks

To date, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) require their own specific methodologies, tools, and technologies. With the rise of 6LoWPAN protocols (i.e., IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks), WSNs can use IP to share a common network layer with other networks and the Internet for highly interoperable device communication. But additional efforts are necessary to develop new or adapt existing application layer protocols for IP-enabled WSNs. Hence, this paper investigates W3C SOAP Web Services (WS) in the context of WSNs. In particular, it is shown that the Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) can be used as an application layer protocol in WSNs.

Impact of MAC frame length on energy efficiency in 6LowPAN

To reach necessary end-to-end connectivity between the Internet and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LowPAN) working group has been established and introduced an adaptation layer for integration of IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer/media access control (PHY/MAC) layers and the upper layers of any Internet protocol (IP)-based networks, such as the Internet. The energy efficiency is one of the most important performance measures in WSNs because most sensor nodes are only battery powered so we should reduce the energy consumption to the lowest to extend the life of nodes. Therefore the determination of MAC frame length should be carefully considered since that the radio frequency (RF) module consumes most the energy of a sensor node meanwhile the MAC protocol is the direct controller of RF module. In this paper, we provide a star-shaped 6LowPAN non-beacon mode with unslotted carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism to access to the channel and model the stochastic behavior of a target end node as the M/G/1 queuing system. Analytical expressions for some parameters such as channel busy probability, packet loss probability and energy efficiency are obtained in this paper and our analytical results can clearly show the impact of MAC frame length on the energy efficiency of a target node in both ideal and lossy channel.

DTLS based security and two-way authentication for the Internet of Things

In this paper, we introduce the first fully implemented two-way authentication security scheme for the Internet of Things (IoT) based on existing Internet standards, specifically the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol. By relying on an established standard, existing implementations, engineering techniques and security infrastructure can be reused, which enables easy security uptake. Our proposed security scheme is therefore based on RSA, the most widely used public key cryptography algorithm. It is designed to work over standard communication stacks that offer UDP/IPv6 networking for Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs). Our implementation of DTLS is presented in the context of a system architecture and the scheme’s feasibility (low overheads and high interoperability) is further demonstrated through extensive evaluation on a hardware platform suitable for the Internet of Things.