Monitoring of 6TiSCH infrastructure with MQTT and Zabbix NMS software

The monitoring of wireless networks is one of the important aspects to ensure the reliability, stability, and performance of the service they provide. However, monitoring can be a challenging task, especially in the case of Low-power Lossy Networks (LLNs). LLN networks are designed with low power usage in mind and they are typically much more constrained than conventional computer networks. For instance, nodes found in LLN networks are typically battery/solar-powered, mounted with short-range transceiver, constrained storage space and memory, low computational power, and run a custom operating system (OS). This paper presents the approach of the LLN network monitoring. For proof of concept, a wireless network is formed in the experiment, consisting of VESNA sensor nodes. Nodes are mounted with IEEE 802.15.4 compliant radio chip and loaded with custom embedded Contiki-NG configured with channel hopping protocol stack (6TiSCH) for communication. To monitor LLN infrastructure, the experiment gives an example of integrating existing state-of-the-art technologies, such as MQTT for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, and Zabbix for data visualization. Results of the experiment are given as Zabbix graphs that show various readings from nodes.