6LoFD: A Failure Detector for 6LoWPAN

Abstract

Failure Detectors (FDs) are a prominent building block for various consensus/agreement protocols in asynchronous systems, and one of several ways to overcome the theoretical limitation stemming from the impossibility result. With the increasing use of asynchronous, wireless Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as IEEE 802.15.4/6LoWPAN, the demand of applications that require some form of reliability and agreement are on the rise. Yet practical implementations of FDs are less visible, and to our knowledge, entirely unavailable for the IEEE 802.15.4/6LoWPAN-stack until recently. We already presented 6LoFD, an FD specifically aimed at energy and memory efficient operation in small scale, unreliable networks. In this work we are able to validate key findings of our initial presentation, but also improve on some identified shortcomings of our preliminary evaluations. We further show significantly broadened evaluation results and related insights.