Martin Ringwelski

Abstract: 6LoWPAN plays a major role within the protocol stack for the future Internet of Things. Its fragmentation mechanism enables transport of IPv6 datagrams with the required minimum MTU of 1280 bytes over 802.15.4-based networks. With the goal of a fully standardized WSN protocol stack currently necessitating a route-over approach, i.e., routing at the IP-layer, there are two main choices for any 6LoWPAN implementation with regard to datagram fragmentation: Hop-by-hop assembly or a cross-layered direct mode, which forwards individual 6LoWPAN fragments before the whole datagram has arrived. In addition to these two straightforward approaches, we propose enhancements based on adaptive rate-restriction for the direct forwarding and a retry control for both modes to reduce the number of losses of larger datagrams. An evaluation of these modes in a simulation environment and a hardware testbed indicate that the proposed enhancements can considerably improve PRR and latency within 6LoWPAN networks.

Abstract: Wireless sensors have been studied over recent years for different promising applications with high value for individuals and society. A good example are wireless sensor networks for patients allowing for better and more efficient monitoring of patients in hospitals or even early discharge form hospital and monitoring at home. These visions have hardly led research as reliability is and issue with wireless networks to be known error-prone. In life critical applications like health care this is not an aspect to be handled carelessly. Fail-safety is an important property for patient monitoring systems. The AA4R project of the Hamburg University of Technology researches on a fail-safe patient monitoring system. Our vision is a dynamically distributed system using suitable devices in the area of a patient. The data in the network is stored with redundancy on several nodes. Patient data is analyzed in the network and uploaded to a medical server. As devices appear, disappear and fail, so do the services being executed on those devices. This article focuses on a Reincarnation Service (RS) to track the functionality of the processes. The RS takes suitable actions when a failure is detected to correct or isolate the failure. Checking of the nodes is done adaptively to achieve a good response time to failures and reduce the power consumption.

Abstract: 6LoWPAN plays a major role within the protocol stack for the future Internet of Things. Its fragmentation mechanism enables transport of IPv6 datagrams with the required minimum MTU of 1280 bytes over 802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks. With the envisioned goal of a fully standardized WSN protocol stack currently necessitating a route-over approach, i.e. routing at the IP-layer, there are two main choices for any 6LoWPAN implementation with regard to datagram fragmentation: Hop-by-hop assembly or a cross-layered direct mode, which forwards individual 6LoWPAN fragments before the whole datagram has arrived. In addition to these two straightforward approaches, we propose enhancements based on adaptive rate-restriction for the direct forwarding and a retry control for both modes to reduce the number of losses of larger datagrams. Our evaluation of the basic and enhanced forwarding modes within simulations and a hardware testbed indicate that the proposed enhancements can considerably improve packet reception rate and latency within 6LoWPAN networks.