Reliability Extensions and Multi-hop Evaluation of Distributed Protocol Stacks

Standardized protocols such as IPv6 and 6LoWPAN allow the operation of heterogeneous wireless sensor network (WSN). However, many existing IPv6 implementations increase the code size requirements to an extent, which makes the deployment of these applications on more constrained devices impossible. To solve this problem, we proposed the concept of Distributed Protocol Stacks (DPS) in an earlier publication, which allows the sharing of protocol implementations between neighbouring nodes. In this paper, we describe and evaluate several extensions to this concept, which enable the use of DPS in large WSN deployments with changing network topologies. This includes mechanisms for the dynamic establishment of DPS connections at runtime in which nodes select their communication partners based on selected node properties (such as power source or duty cycle) and the monitoring and re-establishment of these connections. We evaluate the performance of the proposed extensions using a real world deployment of the DPS protocol using 43 nodes from the Wise bed test bed.