Energy-Efficient Communication with Lightweight M2M in IoT Networks

Abstract: OMA’s Lightweight Machine to Machine (LwM2M) is an application protocol for device management in the Internet of Things (IoT) that has been recently published and widely adopted in a lot of projects. The protocol is designed to operate in sensor networks and machine-to-machine environments, where one of the main constraints is the energy consumption since the nodes are usually battery powered. Different strategies to achieve high energy efficiency in IoT networks have been developed, but there is no deep knowledge about the performance of LwM2M operating with them. Moreover, the specification of this protocol includes one strategy, called the Queue Mode, which could be more efficient than the usual ones because it has been specified for this particular protocol. This project aims to implement this Queue Mode at both sides of the communication, and then evaluate its performance by comparing it with TSCH, which is the standard MAC protocol used in IEEE 802.15.4 that defines a way of radio duty cycling. It has been proven to achieve a high energy efficiency, and that is the main reason why it is selected. The comparison is performed according to several metrics to have a comprehensive evaluation, and in different kind of scenarios, with different numbers of IoT devices and different parameters in the communication. The implementation was done inside the Contiki-NG OS for the client side, which is an operating systems designed for constrained devices. For the server side it has been carried out inside the Eclipse Leshan code, which is a LwM2M implementation in Java made by the Eclipse Foundation. As a result of the evaluation, it shown that both implementations operate correctly. This thesis contributes as a guideline for making decisions about which low power strategy is better to use depending on the IoT scenario and the type of application. It shows that for many use cases Queue Mode is a better option than TSCH because it achieves a higher energy efficiency and the rest of the metrics used in the evaluation have also improved values. TSCH has a better performance only in demanding scenarios or in cases where the communication is not produced at fixed time instants. The thesis was developed in cooperation with RISE SICS AB, Networked Embedded Systems Group.