Experimental Comparison of Radio Duty Cycling Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

The performances of three different asynchronous radio duty cycling protocols available in the Contiki lightweight operating system have been compared experimentally in view of their adoption in medium sized wireless sensor networks integrated in the Internet of Things. This study unveils some of the subtleties of those protocols, allowing an improved tuning of their parameters, as well as the identification of overlooked shortcomings and implementation flaws. To ensure fair comparisons default options have been unified and small implementation and design problems have been tackled. Besides the previously mentioned interventions, default values for parameters were kept. The results of the comparison can help designers of wireless sensor networks with their choices and guide designers of protocols to overcome some critical issues.