Extended performance measurements of scalable 6LoWPAN networks in an Automated Physical Testbed

Abstract

IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks, also known as 6LoWPAN, is becoming more and more a de facto standard for such communications for the Internet of Things, be it in the field of home and building automation, of industrial and process automation, or of smart metering and environmental monitoring. For all of these applications, scalability is a major precondition, as the complexity of the networks continuously increase. To maintain this growing amount of connected nodes a various 6LoWPAN implementations are available. One of the mentioned was developed by the authors' team and was tested on an Automated Physical Testbed for Wireless Systems at the Laboratory Embedded Systems and Communication Electronics of Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, which allows the flexible setup and full control of arbitrary topologies. It also supports time-varying topologies and thus helps to measure performance of the RPL implementation. The results of the measurements prove an excellent stability and a very good short and long-term performance also under dynamic conditions. In all measurements, there is an advantage of minimum 10% with regard to the average times, like global repair time; but the advantage with reagr to average values can reach up to 30%. Moreover, it can be proven that the performance predictions from other papers are consistent with the executed real-life implementations.