Thesis defense — Cédric Chauvenet — October 10

IPv6 protocols for powerline communication sensor network #

The defence will take place on Thursday 10 October 2013 at 10:00 in the Amphithéâtre Chabauty, Institut Fourier, 100 rue des Mathématiques, 38402 Saint-Martin-d’Hères.

Abstract #

This thesis demonstrate the relevance of Powerline Communication (PLC) usage for sensor networks applications. We focus in particular on the low power and low data rate PLC technology “Watt Pulse Communication” (WPC) developed by the Watteco company and justify its usage for sensor network applications. We situate the WPC technology in the PLC landscape and define compatible protocols. We then describe the WPC module and the PLC media implementation in the COOJA network simulator. This allows us to propose a network solution over this technology, leveraging on the adaptation of the 802.15.4 standard over the WPC technology. We then demonstrate the benefit of media convergence at the network layer level, with the use of the IPv6 standard that we adapted over our PLC solution thanks to the 6LoWPAN protocol. We justify the usage of standards protocols over our PLC solution and show that a routing solutions must be developed over WPC. We show through experiments that our PLC solution match low power and lossy network (LLNs) criterions for which the RPL standard protocol has been designed. We justify the usage of this routing protocol over our PLC solution, and validate its implementation through 2 experiments conducted in tertiary types buildings. Respectively composed of 7 and 26 PLC nodes, results show that the routing topology created by RPL enable the coverage an entire floor of a tertiary building with a tree based topology and 3 hops maximum path length. We also show that the WPC technology exhibits a high connectivity between nodes and that the link quality is highly dynamic. Though, we observed that the routing topology was able to handle these variations. We point out the limitations of our PLC solution, which presents high delays and low throughput, creating high constraints on applications. Our sensor network solution over PLC relies on the IP standard, enabling packets exchanges with other technologies using the same protocol. In particular, we study the possibility to create heterogeneous networks mixing the WPC technology with 802.15.4 radio. We show that our protocol stack used over PLC enable to create this type of network, in order to benefit from the best of these 2 worlds. We purpose an architecture of a hybrid Radio / PLC node enabling to transfer packets between these 2 media. Then, we show that the combined usage of these 2 media increase the number of available paths and facilitate the routing, while diminishing the number of hops and possible unreachability of nodes. We then demonstrate that the addition of PLC and Radio/PLC nodes in a RF based battery powered sensor network enable to relieve their routing charge in order to expand their lifetime. We then continue the energy study with a power consumption optimization of a wireless sensor network platform from the hardware and software standpoint. We first determine the operating frequency, the wake up frequency and the mode of operation of the micro controller offering the lowest power consumption. We then conduct an energy study of 4 different radio transceivers using the 2.4 GHz and 868 MHz frequency band, in order to determine the most efficient architecture. We determine the protocols parameters and the software optimization to reach the lower power consumption of this architecture. Finally, we realize the energy study of several probes than can be embedded on the node, according to their nature and functioning mode. Our final architecture exhibits a total power consumption that is lower than 17 μW, with an applicative reporting each 10 minutes and the maintenance of the reachability with the network. We also mention in annex parts our implication in standards developments organizations such as the IETF a the IPSO alliance, that allow us to validate the implementation of our solution through interoperability events.

The full text is available on HAL: tel-01168472.