Cloud connectivity and Network Management in Thread Mesh Network

Abstract

There is a growing interest in short range radio mesh networks with native IP support. Thread is one promising IoT protocol built on a mesh configuration based on the IEEE 802.15 standard. But for the applications with cloud computing, it has a critical limitation that the status of the nodes is not propagated globally so it’s difficult for the administrator to monitor and manage the network. In this thesis, I developed an application based on OpenThread to overcome this limitation, and tested it on a Thread network prototype. Besides, some of the parameters in the implementation of Thread are optimized in order to shorten the interval of updating the node status. CoAP over DTLS, and MQTT-SN are chosen as application protocols for demo and test. As a result, the network administrator can be notified of the node state changes of the Thread network with a reasonable latency, while the newly added function does not influence the Thread network performance.