Is IPv6 a Better Choice to Handle Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks?
With the technological advances in the wireless sensor networks, there is increasing interest to connect them to the Internet to share real-time measurements from WSN nodes to “anyone, anywhere, any time.” IETF (Internet Control Message Protocol) has proposed standards that will enable IPv6-based sensor networks. Recent research has studied the performance of routing protocol (and standard) working on IPv6 for WSN (i.e., RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy networks) and 6LowPAN (IPv6 layer over low-power wireless personal area networks (LoWPAN)) in TinyOS for statically distributed WSN and showed its comparative network performance with respect to the de facto routing protocol standard for TinyOS and WSN. This thesis extends such research effort to study the effect of node mobility on the performance of routing protocol (RPL on 6LowPAN). Original RPL implementation in TinyOS has to be modified to accommodate node mobility. Results from the experiments show that mobility does have negative effect on network latency and packet delivery ratio. In summary, we observe the pattern that the higher the speed of the mobile node, the worse the network performance. The conclusion is that the current RPL routing protocol and standard can only be used in a mobile network environment with low speed mobility. Suggestions on how to modify and improve RPL to be used in a mobile environment are listed based on my experience in implementing and evaluating RPL on a mobile sensor network.
Wireless sensor network (WSN), IPv6, RPL, Wireless sensor networks
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