Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, Via Branze 38, 25123 Brescia, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Feb 22;23(5):2407. doi: 10.3390/s23052407.
The Internet of Things (IoT) approach relies on the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) as a pervasive network protocol. IP acts as a "glue" for interconnecting end devices (on the field side) and end users, leveraging on very diverse lower-level and upper-level protocols. The need for scalability would suggest the adoption of IPv6, but the large overhead and payloads do not match with the constraints dictated by common wireless solutions. For this reason, compression strategies have been proposed to avoid redundant information in the IPv6 header and to provide fragmentation and reassembly of long messages. For example, the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) protocol has been recently referenced by the LoRa Alliance as a standard IPv6 compression scheme for LoRaWAN-based applications. In this way, IoT end points can seamlessly share an end-to-end IP link. However, implementation details are out of the specifications' scope. For this reason, formal test procedures for comparing solutions from different providers are important. In this paper, a test method for assessing architectural delays of real-world deployments of SCHC-over-LoRaWAN implementations is presented. The original proposal includes a mapping phase, for identifying information flows, and a subsequent evaluation phase, in which flows are timestamped and time-related metrics are computed. The proposed strategy has been tested in different use cases involving LoRaWAN backends deployed all around the world. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been tested by measuring the end-to-end latency of IPv6 data in sample use cases, obtaining a delay of less than 1 s. However, the main result is the demonstration that the suggested methodology permits a comparison of the behavior of IPv6 with SCHC-over-LoRaWAN, allowing the optimization of choices and parameters during deployment and commissioning of both infrastructure components and software.
物联网 (IoT) 方法依赖于使用互联网协议 (IP) 作为普及的网络协议。IP 充当连接终端设备（现场侧）和最终用户的“粘合剂”，利用非常多样化的低级和高级协议。可扩展性的需求建议采用 IPv6，但大的开销和有效负载与常见无线解决方案规定的约束不匹配。出于这个原因，已经提出了压缩策略来避免 IPv6 报头中的冗余信息，并提供长消息的分段和重组。例如，静态上下文头压缩 (SCHC) 协议最近被 LoRa 联盟引用为基于 LoRaWAN 的应用程序的标准 IPv6 压缩方案。这样，物联网端点可以无缝共享端到端的 IP 链路。但是，实现细节超出了规范的范围。因此，来自不同供应商的解决方案的正式测试程序很重要。在本文中，提出了一种评估 SCHC-over-LoRaWAN 实现的实际部署的架构延迟的测试方法。原始提案包括一个映射阶段，用于识别信息流，以及随后的评估阶段，其中流被标记时间戳并计算与时间相关的指标。所提出的策略已经在涉及部署在世界各地的 LoRaWAN 后端的不同用例中进行了测试。通过在示例用例中测量 IPv6 数据的端到端延迟来测试所提出方法的可行性，获得了小于 1 秒的延迟。然而，主要结果是证明所建议的方法允许比较 IPv6 与 SCHC-over-LoRaWAN 的行为，从而允许在基础设施组件和软件的部署和调试过程中优化选择和参数。
