Development and Performance Analysis of HRPL Using 6LoWPAN CC2538 Module for IoT Ecosystem

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) application has been experiencing increasingly progressive demand, especially for embedded devices (ED). However, the ED has limited capabilities, low power consumption resources, and low bandwidth in connecting to the Internet by using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Therefore, the WSNs form creates a necessity for new technologies and protocols for the IoT implementation. Thus, IPv6 Low Power Area Network (6LoWPAN) was designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to overcome the Internet Protocol (IP) based communication that allows direct communication between each ED. Nevertheless, the communication between ED using 6LoWPAN becomes challenging in designing routing protocols to achieve the efficient performance Quality of Service (QoS). Among the existing protocols for the 6LoWPAN network, RPL is considered effective for the 6LoWPAN system. However, the Power Consumption (PC) and routing overhead of RPL is high when it was implemented in a real scenario. Therefore, HRPL was proposed to enhance the RPL by introducing the rebroadcast technique in order to minimize the routing overhead at the same time reduced the PC usage. Thus, this paper is an extended version, in which 6LoWPAN Smart Home Testbed (6LoSH) was developed to investigate the impact of the number of nodes on PC usage for both protocols (HRPL and RPL) in a real scenario. The result shows for this instance, HRPL has succeeded in reducing the use of PC for both experiments (simulation and 6LoSH). On the other hand, the number of nodes had given an impact on PC usage. For further work, we plan to use multiple topologies and the different number of nodes to explore the HRPL for some performance metrics such as convergent time and latency.