The purpose of this work is to analyze, develop and test a solution for establishing network and application level communications within RIOT, one of the newest operating systems designed to be deployed on IoT devices. Among its features, RIOT adopts a modular structure with a minimalist kernel and has a unique network stack, called GNRC, that supports protocols for network communications such as IPv6, ICMPv6 or 6LoWPAN. In particular, 6LoWPAN is characterized by compressing IPv6 packets so that they can be transported in energy efficient wireless networks with low data transmission rates, on which IoT devices tend to operate and exchange information between them. This protocol is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard that only defines the physical and media access control layers of the OSI model for this type of network. Hence, 6LoWPAN is used to scale to the network layer. Nevertheless, it is not able to provide packet routing on its own, and this issue led to the definition of additional technologies, the most popular being the RPL protocol.
It is significant to notice that RIOT constitutes an open source collaborative project with a wide variety of example applications, whose code is written in the C programming language. Moreover, the modules that are declared in the “Makefile” of these applications, which can have network, transport, system or other functionalities, are added at compile time so the applications are executed properly and resource use remains low. All things considered, RIOT is just one of the many existing options for IoT dedicated operating systems. Some alternatives are Tiny OS, Contiki OS or Zephyr, the latter being a system with very similar characteristics but more oriented towards industrial projects. However, the choice of RIOT is a perfect fit to the context of this work as it is commonly used in academic or partnership environments. Besides, since its first appearance in 2013, RIOT’s development has continued to grow, giving rise to multiple tasks that create a challenging roadmap for potential or current contributors.