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Projecte llegit

Títol: Performance evaluation of IPv6 over Sigfox: focusing on SCHC fragmentation


Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:


Director/a: GÓMEZ MONTENEGRO, CARLES

Departament: ENTEL

Títol: Performance evaluation of IPv6 over Sigfox: focusing on SCHC fragmentation

Data inici oferta: 23-06-2020     Data finalització oferta: 23-02-2021



Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    MU MASTEAM 2015
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Segon director/a (UPC): VIDAL FERRÉ, RAFAEL
 
Paraules clau:
Internet of Things, IoT, IPv6, Sigfox, LPWAN, low power
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises a significant transformation of our society. IoT devices (often equipped with sensors) may obtain information from the physical world, which can be used to enable innovative applications, such as smart cities, smart home, Industry 4.0, etc.

There exists a wide range of communications technologies for IoT devices. Recently, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies have emerged as an interesting family of IoT technologies. LPWANs often very long range (e.g. several kilometers), which simplifies the related network deployment and maintenace costs.

Sigfox is a flagship LPWAN technology, which however does not natively support IPv6. In order to enable integration of Sigfox devices with the Internet, the IETF has recently been developing new specifications, intended to support IPv6 over Sigfox.

As of today, the performance that can be achieved with IPv6 over Sigfox has not yet been explored. This project proposes a performance evaluation of IPv6 over Sigfox. The study may be based on evaluating performance parameters such as latency, energy consumption, and/or message overhead, as a function of different protocol parameter settings, and in a range of scenarios. The main priority in the project will be performing the evaluation by means of real experiments. However, if for unexpected reasons that is not possible, the project may be carried out by theoretical and/or simulation means.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
IoT is emerging nowadays, and new technologies are entering the market. There are various technology categories in IoT, one of which is Low-Power
Wide Area Networks (LPWANs). It consists of technologies with a large range, relatively low data rate and lightweight payload.

A challenge that those technologies are facing is the support of the IPv6 protocol, in order to be able to support Internet connectivity. The IETF has
recently defined Static Context Header Compression and fragmentation (SCHC), an adaptation layer defined by the IETF to support IPv6 over LPWAN technologies.

However, as SCHC is a new protocol, its performance has not yet been
evaluated. The purpose of this Master Thesis is to evaluate the performance of IPv6 over Sigfox, a LPWAN technology that is growing over the last years,
through SCHC. In particular, this Master Thesis is on SCHC fragmentation performance over Sigfox.

A testbed has been created for that evaluation, using a device that supports
Sigfox and a cloud server. Several performance metrics have been chosen, like the transmission duration of a packet (which is evaluated both theoretically
and experimentally), the amount of uplink and downlink messages exchanged, and the energy performance.

The findings of the evaluations show that sending larger packets through Sigfox network using SCHC fragmentation is feasible and the transmission duration may vary from some seconds, up to hours, depending on the size of the packet and the transmission errors. Finally, a device¿s lifetime when transmitting SCHC Packets may range from 2 months, up to more than 4 years, depending on the SCHC Packet size and the period T of transmitting the packet.


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