Performance Evaluation of Dynamic Multiprotocol with Forwarding Service on a Radio Co-Processor

Internet of Things protocols such as ZigBee, Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are the popular low-power protocols developed for interconnection among wireless devices in IoT systems using the same frequency spectrum. In this paper we propose a general mechanism providing the concurrent multiple protocol operation on a radio co-processor with can support seamless connections to multiple standard IoT devices. Dynamic multiprotocol technique allows a network node to run BLE and IEEE 805.14 standard stacks simultaneously. Additionally, by implementing a service called forwarding service on top of the BLE and Thread stacks, a connection between a Thread-only node and a BLE application can be established through a BLE/Thread multiprotocol node acting as a forwarder. Moreover, remote control and observation of the multiprotocol network from the Internet are enabled by using the popular MQTT protocol. To demonstrate the benefits of our proposed mechanism for various IoT applications, a deep performance evaluation is conducted in a real testbed with several scenarios.