Impact of application-driven multi-radio emulation in embedded devices on IETF LoWPAN standards

As global standards evolve on WPAN mobility, engineering design becomes more challenging for sensor nodes that form WPAN groups at random based on data sensing and acquisition (application) profiles. As sensor node platforms typically have computation blocks that can handle a minimal set of instructions (8 bit microcontrollers and less) and are greatly constrained (8KB static firmware footprint and 64KB RAM), the clear challenge in supporting multi-applications (and hence multi-radios) to enhance the sensor’s functionalities is the implementation of different radio and application profile stacks on the embedded system. The main design bottlenecks are system architecture optimization for multi-radio stacks, application-driven PHY/MAC emulation in the 8KB static firmware and of course, ensuring low power and high battery life. Our studies indicate that overcoming these embedded systems engineering bottlenecks in sensor node designs involves rethinking a few standards and raising the need to have new standards in the IETF LoWPAN WG. On this paper, we would like to show the need to introduce a new protocol in the LoWPAN WG derived from overcoming some of the sensor node design bottlenecks in seamless pervasive indoor environments.