NS3 simulation studies for optimized neighbour discovery in 6LoWPAN networks

The main motivation behind the 6LoWPAN standard is that every sensor node has to be connected to Internet and participate in Internet of Things (IoT). The RFC 6775 provides optimized Neighbor Discovery (ND) procedure which is supposedly provides better performance when compared to traditional ICMPv6 neighbor discovery process. The main optimization is obtained due to reduced multicast messages host initiated router interactions that support both sleeping nodes and lesser time spent in message transmission. This work presents the implementation details of important features in this optimized ND process. This work is done in the form of an NS3 model where in ICMPv6 model is implemented considering the ND optimizations. The simulation results are compared against the performance of basic ND process for IPv6 described in RFC 4861. Our results show that optimized ND for 6LoWPAN reduces the exchange of control messages by 50 to 70 percent.