Open Access

Wireless communication systems more and more become part of our daily live. Especially with the Internet of Things (IoT) the overall connectivity increases rapidly since everyday objects become part of the global network. For this purpose several new wireless protocols have arisen, whereas 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) can be seen as one of the most important protocols within this sector. Originally designed on top of the IEEE802.15.4 standard it is a subject to various adaptions that will allow to use 6LoWPAN over different technologies; e.g. DECT Ultra Low Energy (ULE). Although this high connectivity offers a lot of new possibilities, there are several requirements and pitfalls coming along with such new systems. With an increasing number of connected devices the interoperability between different providers is one of the biggest challenges, which makes it necessary to verify the functionality and stability of the devices and the network. Therefore testing becomes one of the key components that decides on success or failure of such a system. Although there are several protocol implementations commonly available; e.g., for IoT based systems, there is still a lack of according tools and environments as well as for functional and conformance testing. This article describes the architecture and functioning of the proposed test framework based on Testing and Test Control Notation Version 3 (TTCN-3) for 6LoWPAN over ULE networks.

The Bluetooth community is in the process to develop mesh technology. This is highly promising as Bluetooth is widely available in Smart Phones and Tablet PCs, allowing an easy access to the Internet of Things. In this paper work, we investigate the performance of Bluetooth enabled mesh networking that we performed to identify the strengths and weaknesses. A demonstrator for this protocol has been implemented by using the Fruity Mesh protocol implementation. Extensive test cases have been executed to measure the performance, the reliability, the power consumption and the delay. For this, an Automated Physical Testbed (APTB), which emulates the physical channels has been used. The results of these measurements are considered useful for the real implementation of Bluetooth; not only for home and building automation, but also for industrial automation.

6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) is gaining more and more attraction for the seamless connectivity of embedded devices for the Internet of Things. It can be observed that most of the available solutions are following an open source approach, which significantly leads to a fast development of technologies and of markets. Although the currently available implementations are in a pretty good shape, all of them come with some significant drawbacks. It was therefore decided to start the development of an own implementation, which takes the advantages from the existing solutions, but tries to avoid the drawbacks. This paper discussed the reasoning behind this decision, describes the implementation and its characteristics, as well as the testing results. The given implementation is available as open-source project under [15].

A novel approach of a testbed for embedded networking nodes has been conceptualized and implemented. It is based on the use of virtual nodes in a PC environment, where each node executes the original embedded code. Different nodes are running in parallel and are connected via so-called virtual interfaces. The presented approach is very efficient and allows a simple description of test cases without the need of a network simulator. Furthermore, it speeds up the process of developing new features.