TCP in the Internet of Things: from ostracism to prominence

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.TCP has traditionally been neglected as a transport-layer protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, recent trends and industry needs are favoring TCP presence in IoT environments. In this article, we describe the main IoT scenarios where TCP will be used. We then analyze the historically claimed issues of TCP in the IoT context. We argue that, in contrast to generally accepted wisdom, most of those possible issues fall in one of the following categories: i) are also found in well-accepted IoT end-to-end reliability mechanisms, ii) can be solved, or iii) are not actual issues. Considering the future prominent role of TCP in the IoT, we provide recommendations for lightweight TCP implementation and suitable operation in such scenarios, based on our IETF standardization work on the topic.Postprint (author's final draft

Modeling the connectivity of Data-Channel-based Bluetooth Low Energy mesh networks

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has become one of the most popular low-power wireless technologies. While BLE was originally designed for star topology networks only, recent developments have focused on enabling mesh network topology support for BLE. An emerging category of BLE mesh network initiatives is based on routing data units over BLE data channels. This letter investigates the fundamental connectivity parameters of data-channel-based BLE mesh networks, such as the probability of no isolation of a node and network K-connectivity. We provide an analytical model for both parameters which is validated by means of extensive simulations.Postprint (author's final draft

CoAP congestion control for the Internet of Things

“© © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.” August Betzler, Javier Isern, Carles Gomez, Ilker Demirkol, Josep Paradells, "Experimental evaluation of congestion control for CoAP communications without end-to-end reliability", Ad Hoc Networks, pp. , 2016, ISSN 15708705. DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2016.7509394CoAP is a lightweight RESTful application layer protocol devised for the IoT. Operating on top of UDP, CoAP must handle congestion control by itself. The core CoAP specification defines a basic congestion control mechanism, but it is not capable of adapting to network conditions. However, IoT scenarios exhibit significant resource constraints, which pose new challenges on the design of congestion control mechanisms. In this article we present CoCoA, an advanced congestion control mechanism for CoAP being standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force CoRE working group. CoCoA introduces a novel round-trip time estimation technique, together with a variable backoff factor and aging mechanisms in order to provide dynamic and controlled retransmission timeout adaptation suitable for the peculiarities of IoT communications. We conduct a comparative performance analysis of CoCoA and a variety of alternative algorithms including state-of-the-art mechanisms developed for TCP. The study is based on experiments carried out in real testbeds. Results show that, in contrast to the alternative methods considered, CoCoA consistently outperforms the default CoAP congestion control mechanism in all evaluated scenarios.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The SF12 well in LoRaWAN: problem and end-device-based solutions

© 2021 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)LoRaWAN has become a popular technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) device connectivity. One of the expected properties of LoRaWAN is high network scalability. However, LoRaWAN network performance may be compromised when even a relatively small number of devices use link-layer reliability. After failed frame delivery, such devices typically tend to reduce their physical layer bit rate by increasing their spreading factor (SF). This reaction increases channel utilization, which may further degrade network performance, even into congestion collapse. When this problem arises, all the devices performing reliable frame transmission end up using SF12 (i.e., the highest SF in LoRaWAN). In this paper, we identify and characterize the described network condition, which we call the SF12 Well, in a range of scenarios and by means of extensive simulations. The results show that by using alternative SF-management techniques it is possible to avoid the problem, while achieving a packet delivery ratio increase of up to a factor of 4.7.Postprint (published version

Evaluation of receiver-feedback techniques for fragmentation over LPWANs

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThe Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has standardized a new framework for IPv6 support over Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs), called Static Context Header Compression and Fragmentation (SCHC). SCHC includes acknowledgment (ACK)-based mechanisms for reliable fragmented packet transmission. For the latter, SCHC defines a Receiver-Feedback Technique (RFT), called Compressed Bitmap (CB), by which a receiver reports to the sender whether the fragments carrying a packet have been received or not. Such information is carried as ACK payload. Considering the extraordinary frame size and message rate constraints of LPWANs, ACK payload size becomes crucial. In this paper, we compare the performance of CB with that of several alternative RFTs, namely List of Lost Fragments (LLF), List of Deltas (LoD), and Uncompressed Bitmap (UB), where the latter is used as a benchmark. We evaluate the considered RFTs in terms of ACK size, number of Layer 2 (L2) frames needed to carry an ACK, and ACK Time on Air. Our analysis shows that the use of RFTs different from CB offers significant performance improvement in many scenarios. Furthermore, we provide guidance on which RFT should be used for different packet sizes, error rates and error patterns.This research is funded in part by the ERDF and the Spanish Government through project TEC2016-79988-P and project PID2019-106808RA-I00, AEI/FEDER, EU.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Bluetooth mesh energy consumption: a model

The recent publication of the Bluetooth Mesh standard is a remarkable milestone in the evolution of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). As a new technology in the Internet of Things (IoT) market, it is crucial to investigate the performance of Bluetooth Mesh. However, while a fundamental feature of Bluetooth Mesh is its suitability for energy-constrained devices, this aspect has not yet been properly considered in the literature. In this paper, we model the current consumption, lifetime and energy cost per delivered bit of a battery-operated Bluetooth Mesh sensor node. The model is based on measurements performed on a real hardware platform. Evaluation results quantify the impact of crucial Bluetooth Mesh parameters. Among others, we have found that a sensor device running on a simple 235 mAh battery, and sending a data message every 10 s, can achieve a lifetime of up to 15.6 months, whereas the asymptotic lifetime is 21.4 months.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Sharp affine Sobolev type inequalities via the Lp Busemann–Petty centroid inequality

We show that the Lp Busemann-Petty centroid inequality provides an elementary and powerful tool to the study of some sharp affine functional inequalities with a geometric content, like log-Sobolev, Sobolev and Gagliardo-Nirenberg inequalities. Our approach allows also to characterize directly the corresponding equality cases.Coordenação de aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de nivel superiorInstituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e AplicadaConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e TecnológicoFundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerai

From 6LoWPAN to 6Lo: expanding the universe of IPv6-supported technologies for the Internet of Things

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksLeveraging 6LoWPAN, the IETF 6Lo Working Group has targeted adaptation of IPv6 over a new generation of communication technologies for the IoT. These comprise Bluetooth LE, ITU-T G.9959, DECT ULE, MS/TP, NFC, IEEE 1901.2, and IEEE 802.11ah. This article comprehensively analyzes the 6Lo technologies and adaptation layers, giving the motivation for critical design decisions, highlighting crucial aspects for performance, and presenting main challenges.Postprint (author's final draft

IPv6 Mesh over BLUETOOTH(R) Low Energy using IPSP

RFC 7668 describes the adaptation of 6LoWPAN techniques to enable IPv6 over Bluetooth low energy networks that follow the star topology. However, recent Bluetooth specifications allow the formation of extended topologies as well. This document specifies mechanisms that are needed to enable IPv6 mesh over Bluetooth Low Energy links established by using the Bluetooth Internet Protocol Support Profile. This document does not specify the routing protocol to be used in an IPv6 mesh over Bluetooth LE links.Preprin