Connecting the World of Embedded Mobiles: The RIOT Approach to Ubiquitous Networking for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly evolving based on low-power compliant protocol standards that extend the Internet into the embedded world. Pioneering implementations have proven it is feasible to inter-network very constrained devices, but had to rely on peculiar cross-layered designs and offer a minimalistic set of features. In the long run, however, professional use and massive deployment of IoT devices require full-featured, cleanly composed, and flexible network stacks.This paper introduces the networking architecture that turns RIOT into a powerful IoT system, to enable low-power wireless scenarios. RIOT networking offers (i) a modular architecture with generic interfaces for plugging in drivers, protocols, or entire stacks, (ii) support for multiple heterogeneous interfaces and stacks that can concurrently operate, and (iii) GNRC, its cleanly layered, recursively composed default network stack. We contribute an in-depth analysis of the communication performance and resource efficiency of RIOT, both on a micro-benchmarking level as well as by comparing IoT communication across different platforms. Our findings show that, though it is based on significantly different design tradeoffs, the networking subsystem of RIOT achieves a performance equivalent to that of Contiki and TinyOS, the two operating systems which pioneered IoT software platforms.

A Lesson in Scaling 6LoWPAN – Minimal Fragment Forwarding in Lossy Networks

“…RIOT provides a stable 6LoWPAN implementation as part of its default network stack, GNRC [24], [25]. Instead of statically allocating packet space for each reassembly buffer, it uses the preconfigurable packet allocation arena of GNRC, called gnrc_pktbuf, to dynamically allocate packet buffer space of varying length within it.…”

IoT Content Object Security with OSCORE and NDN: A First Experimental Comparison

“…In all protocol configurations, security extensions add message overhead and consequently affect transmission times. Notably for IEEE 802.15.4, inflated messages easily increase media access times by a few milliseconds, whereas computational overhead in common IoT network stacks is in the range of microseconds [25]. We now quantify the overhead in terms of packet size which is introduced by the different security extensions.…”

A DTLS Abstraction Layer for the Recursive Networking Architecture in RIOT

“…The RIOT networking subsystem is designed to follow a modular architecture with clean interfaces for abstracting all layers [5]. This facilitates the creation and integration of new protocols, different implementations, or additional layers such as a new encryption layer to the existing stack.…”

“…Other stacks that introduce different networking protocols such as ICN also integrate via the same interfaces. Various experimental evaluations and benchmarks [5], [6] have proven the feasibility and efficiency of this flexible approach to networking in RIOT.…”