Network-State-Aware Quality of Service Provisioning for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes a diverse range of technologies to enable a diverse range of applications using diverse platforms for communication. IP-enabled Wireless Sensor Networks (6LoWPAN) are an integral part of IoT realization because of their huge potential for sensing and communication. The provision of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in IoT is a challenging task because of device heterogeneity in terms of bandwidth, computing and communication capabilities of the diverse set of IoT nodes and networks. The sensor nodes in IoT, e.g., 6LoWPAN, exhibit low battery power, limited bandwidth and extremely constrained computing power. Additionally, these IP-based sensor networks are inherently dynamic in nature due to node failures and mobility. Introduction of modern delay-sensitive applications for such networks has made the QoS provisioning task even harder. In this paper, we present Network-State-Adaptive QoS provision algorithm for 6LoWPAN, which adapts with the changing network state to ensure that QoS requirements are met even with the dynamic network states. It is a policy-based mechanism, which collaborates with the underlying routing protocol to satisfy the QoS requirements specified in the high level policies. It is simple in its implementation yet minimizes the degradation of the best effort traffic at a considerable level. Our implementation results show that our protocol adjusts well in dynamic 6LoWPAN environment where multiple services are competing for available limited resources