The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving based on low-power compliant
protocol standards that extend the Internet into the embedded world. Pioneering
implementations have proven it is feasible to inter-network very constrained
devices, but had to rely on peculiar cross-layered designs and offer a
minimalistic set of features. In the long run, however, professional use and
massive deployment of IoT devices require full-featured, cleanly composed, and
flexible network stacks.
This paper introduces the networking architecture that turns RIOT into a
powerful IoT system, to enable low-power wireless scenarios. RIOT networking
offers (i) a modular architecture with generic interfaces for plugging in
drivers, protocols, or entire stacks, (ii) support for multiple heterogeneous
interfaces and stacks that can concurrently operate, and (iii) GNRC, its
cleanly layered, recursively composed default network stack. We contribute an
in-depth analysis of the communication performance and resource efficiency of
RIOT, both on a micro-benchmarking level as well as by comparing IoT
communication across different platforms. Our findings show that, though it is
based on significantly different design trade-offs, the networking subsystem of
RIOT achieves a performance equivalent to that of Contiki and TinyOS, the two
operating systems which pioneered IoT software platforms