Energy-efficient fragment recovery techniques for Low-Power and Lossy Networks

The 6LoWPAN layer was recently introduced as a means to enable the transmission of IPv6 datagrams over Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). That layer provides schemes for fragmenting the network-layer datagrams and reassembling link-layer fragments. However, the loss of one fragment of the original datagram will lead to the loss of the latter, and eventually the retransmission of all the fragments, which is not energy-efficient. Simple Frame Forwarding and Recovery (SFFR), introduced by Thubert and Hui, is a simple end-to-end scheme for coping with MAC-layer losses in multi-hop LLNs. In this paper, we study the performance of SFFR in multi-hop wireless networks, in terms of energy consumption. Numerical results show that SFFR offers an efficient alternative to classical, hop-by-hop error-control schemes like ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request).