QoS LowPan for Internet of Things

An Internet of Things (IoT) system connects the physical world into Internet via radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensors, and mobile devices. IoT is an intelligent collaboration of tiny sensors and devicesgiving new challenges to the end to end communication of things. 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) is a promising IoT IETF standard for connecting sensors across IPv6 clouds. Some sensing applications are time sensitive and may require bounded delay in sending the sensed data. 

In particular, military, mission critical and safety domains generally require rapid and/or real time data transfer. Therefore, some QoS feature would be required to give sensor network administrators the ability to control the overall network performance. 6LoWPAN offers a QoS feature based on two prioritybits. So far, no implementation of these priority bits was done. In this paper, using simulation, we evaluate the effectiveness of these priority bits in various scenarios. We show that under very heavy or very low network loads, these bits have a limited effect on the delay. However, in most realistic scenarios where the network is reasonably loaded (between 40 to 60 %), it is straightforward to apply ahpriority-based QoS priority in 6LoWPANs.