Integrating low power devices with ELIoT using standard protocols

Nowadays, the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) has raised new demands for the tra-ditional Internet. It is is driven by an expansion of the Internet through the inclusion of physical objects combined with an ability to provide smarter services to the busi-ness processes as more information becomes available. Within the network all the ob-jects are required to be uniquely addressed. But due to the limitation of IPv4, even if the supply of IPv4 addresses were not to be exhausted soon, the size of IPv4 itself is not large enough to support the Internet of Things, so transition to IPv6 is inevitable and around the corner. However, conventional IP protocol stack is not suitable for wireless sensor net-work, where the resources and energy are constrained. 6LoWPAN offers a feasible solution for communication between IPv6 network and WSN. Constrained Applica-tion Protocol (CoAP) is a lightweight application layer protocol that is specifically designed for resource-constrained internet devices and constrained networks. It is in-tended to reduce the power consumption of the sensors and extend battery life. As a sequel to the study described above, the overall purpose of this thesis is dedicated to the implementation of the CoAP protocol not only on x86 platform but also on embedded devices, and make it possible to interconnect to each other. The implementation consists of a client, a server and a gateway. The client part adopts a framework called ELIoT (Erlang language for the Internet of Things), sends CoAP request to access to the information or functionality that is available. The server part is developed on an open source operating system called CONTIKI, which offers standard protocol like IPv4, IPv6, 6LoWPAN, RPL. It is responsible for gathering the environment data according to the CoAP request. The gateway is placed between the server and client, it will automatically convert the target protocol type and forward the data through wireless or wired interface. It plays the role of interconnecting the dif-ferent platforms and is easy to deploy and manage as the entire process.