Design of self-organizing protocol for LoWPAN networks

IoT technology is widely employed to solve the problem of large-scale monitoring, e.g. in the context of smart cities or smart industries. Nevertheless, several issues have to be addressed in this context. The number of nodes can be very large and, sometimes, nodes can be not be easily reachable for humans interventions. Other important issues are battery life and node failure, two aspects that can affect the quality of service provided by the IoT system as well as related costs. To deal with the aspects above we propose a LoWPAN (Low power Wire-less Personal Area Network) network protocol that supports an automatic network construction without any human intervention. The resulting network is a tree structure featuring a main node which, in turn, is linked with the wireless gateway and a number of middle nodes (the first layer of the tree), while the leafs are called End nodes. The network structure and the underlying protocol described in this paper are designed to face the problem of configuration and to balance inter-node communication to ensure a fair power consumption. The proposed approach also features self-repair capabilities, as it is able to perform automatic recovery after a node failure. A case study is briefly discussed to show a potential application of the described approach.