Variable Length Group Multicasting for IPv6 based Wireless Sensor Network using Protocol Independent Multicast

Abstract

Internet of Things has the potential to connect sensor network with global network to create smart environment. For global connectivity, IPv6 low power over wireless personal area network stack provides compressed packet header format, addressing and fragmentation within wireless sensor networks. Sensor network has limited energy therefore protocol independent multicast is more feasible approach which avoids self discovery and relies on existing routing protocol. For large networks such as Internet of Things, the scalability and energy efficiency are major issues and protocol independent multicast in fixed memory size limits the network dimensions because of inadequate number of group members. This paper, therefore, proposes a variable length group multicasting with upper layer implementation of protocol independent multicast using Berkeley low-power internet protocol IPv6 stack of TinyOS which consumes 490 bytes of RAM. The results and comparisons in Tossim of TinyOS reveal that our proposed idea is more scalable. When network grows constant 98% packet delivery ratio is achieved having improved energy consumption in comparison with unicast, flooding and branch aggregation multicast.