Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm envisages expanding the current Internet with a huge number of the intelligent communicating devices. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) deploys the devices running on the meager energy supplies, and measuring environmental phenomena (like temperature, radioactivity, or CO2). WSN popular applications include monitoring, telemetry, and natural disaster prevention. Major WSN challenges are how to allow energy efficiency, overcome impairments of wireless medium, and operate in the self-organized manner. The WSN integrating IoT will rely on a set of the open standards striving to offer scalability, reliability in a variety of the operating scenarios and conditions. Nevertheless, the current state of the standards has interoperability issues and can benefit from further improvements. The contributions of the thesis work are: • We conducted an experimental analysis and characterization of a WSN environment. Our analysis included the link characterization, correlation with environmental parameters as well as network dynamics. Analytical study allowed us to identify key weaknesses of the WSN environment as well a get a better understanding of the dynamics—both link and node neighborhood related. • We confront the interoperability issue of the leading IEEE 802.15.4 standard on the Medium Access Control layer and RPL standard on the transport layer. We propose to accommodate the original cluster-tree structure and to build an elegant framework for collision free multi-hop operation of the IEEE 802.15.4 that will allow RPL to run on top of it. Furthermore, we evaluate through extensive simulations two distributed schemes that achieve near collision free self-organization of the nodes. • We propose a distributed cross-layer convergecast topology construction within the joint IEEE 802.15.4 and RPL framework. Self-organization scheme obtains a topological structure obeying the global recommendations by the sole use of locally measured metrics. Extensive simulations demonstrate the advantages of the resulting structure in terms of convergence time, stability, and energy efficiency in long term and a positive impact on the routing performances. • We propose a set of new mechanisms that will improve RPL performances and enable Quality of Service operation that will handle delay sensitive traffic. Our multi-path opportunistic routing extension helps to improve packet delivery before a deadline, while minimizing overhead and energy consumption compared to the basic version of RPL.STAR
