Leveraging IP for Sensor Network Deployment

Ease of deployment has always been seen as a major selling point of wireless sensor networks, yet experience has shown deployment to be difficult. We argue that parts of these difficulties have come from the lack of a generic networking layer and of well-tested, generic transport protocols in traditional sensornet deployments. We believe that the use of low-power IPv6 can help by providing nodelevel addressing, point-to-point routing, and generic well-tested transport protocols. We evaluate the performance of HTTP/TCP and CoAP/UDP over a duty cycled radio layer, showing that with a small modification to the duty cycling layer results in a dramatic improvement in performance at a retained low power consumption. Based on our experiences, we introduce an in-network caching mechanism that significantly improves the performance of software updates in incrementally deployed sensor networks. Our results are the first steps towards a deployment tool for IP-based sensor networks.