Experimental Performance Evaluation of TCP/IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In order to implement wireless sensing and monitoring services at large scale, Internet connection is highly desirable. Particularly, TCP is indispensable for end-to-end connection orientated communication. It is well known that low power and low rate IEEE802.15.4 based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to the interference from collocated Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) utilizing the same un-licensed 2.4GHz frequency band. Such coexistence interference seriously deteriorates the performance of TCP/IPv6 over WSN, resulting in packet losses, disconnections, reduced throughput and so on. This thesis focuses on experimental research on the performance evaluation and improvement of TCP/IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 based WSN. In this research, a versatile testbed has been developed and implemented, which consists of off-the-selves and custom built hardware, open source and in-house developed firmware and software. A periodical monitoring/sensing application that uses TCP to transmit data over WSN has been developed and used for performance evaluation when there is various Wi-Fi interference close by. Based on the observations and analysis of our experimental results, several important parameters that impact the TCP packet transmission performance have been identified. Performance improvement technique is proposed to effectively adjust these parameters so as to support periodic monitoring/sensing application with substantial better performance. Extensive experiments have been performed in the testbed to evaluate the performance of WSN packets transmission via TCP over WSN when subjected to different Wi-Fi interference.