The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has made wireless connectivity ubiquitous and necessary. Extending the IoT to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) places significant demands in terms of reliability on wireless connectivity. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Std 802.15.4-2015 standard was designed in response to these demands, and the IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) adaptation layer was introduced to address (among other issues) its payload size limitations by performing packet compression and fragmentation. However, the standardised method does not cope well with low link-quality situations and, thus, we present the state-of-the-art Forward Error Correction (FEC) methods and introduce our own contribution, Network Coding FEC (NCFEC), to improve performance in these situations. We present and analyse the existing methods as well as our own theoretically, and we then implement them and perform an experimental evaluation using the 6TiSCH simulator. The simulation results demonstrate that when high reliability is required and only low quality links are available, NCFEC performs best, with a trade-off between additional network and computational overhead. In situations where the link quality can be guaranteed to be higher, simpler solutions also start to be feasible, but with reduced adaptation flexibility.

The devices of Internet of Things (IoT) networks can be deployed for extended period of time in inaccessible locations. After their deployment, new features, bug fixes, or changes in the client needs can require an update of the node's behavior, and this update has to be transmitted over the radio medium. Proposals have been made in the literature to apply the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm to wireless sensor networks but they focus on the packet forwarding layer of the stack. In this work, we propose to extend the programmability to the whole stack with a fully programmable device architecture able to handle the runtime programming of every protocol on any hardware. We detail the use of extended finite-state machines (XFSM) on which the architecture is based and their conversion to compact executable bytecode that can be sent over radio. Simulations demonstrate that this architecture can reproduce a protocol from the literature and enable interoperability between programmable nodes and legacy nodes.