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IPv6 multicast forwarding in RPL-based wireless sensor networks

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journal contribution
posted on 2013-09-13, 11:24 authored by George Oikonomou, Iain PhillipsIain Phillips, Theo Tryfonas
In wireless sensor deployments, network layer multicast can be used to improve the bandwidth and energy efficiency for a variety of applications, such as service discovery or network management. However, despite efforts to adopt IPv6 in networks of constrained devices, multicast has been somewhat overlooked. The Multicast Forwarding Using Trickle (Trickle Multicast) internet draft is one of the most noteworthy efforts. The specification of the IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) also attempts to address the area but leaves many questions unanswered. In this paper we highlight our concerns about both these approaches. Subsequently, we present our alternative mechanism, called stateless multicast RPL forwarding algorithm (SMRF), which addresses the aforementioned drawbacks. Having extended the TCP/IP engine of the Contiki embedded operating system to support both trickle multicast (TM) and SMRF, we present an in-depth comparison, backed by simulated evaluation as well as by experiments conducted on a multi-hop hardware testbed. Results demonstrate that SMRF achieves significant delay and energy efficiency improvements at the cost of a small increase in packet loss. The outcome of our hardware experiments show that simulation results were realistic. Lastly, we evaluate both algorithms in terms of code size and memory requirements, highlighting SMRF's low implementation complexity. Both implementations have been made available to the community for adoption.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Citation

OIKONOMOU, G., PHILLIPS, I. and TRYFONAS, T., 2013. IPv6 multicast forwarding in RPL-based wireless sensor networks. Wireless Personal Communications, 73 (3), pp.1089-1116.

Publisher

© Springer Science+Business Media

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2013

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Wireless Personal Communications [© Springer Science+Business Media] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11277-013-1250-5

ISSN

0929-6212

eISSN

1572-834X

Language

  • en