A Comparative Study between 6LoWPAN and BLE for M2M WSN Applications

Great potentials of cooperative robots are being unveiled in recent years in fostering the provision of new services through multi-agent-based intelligent systems. Robot cooperation is an area that involves stringent synchronization, tight-timeliness and accurate communication of distributed processes. In this area, the role that Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play in the cooperation between machines is of paramount importance. WSNs have been demonstrated in so many applications using various communication protocols and techniques to address challenges like Quality of Service (QoS), security, latency, energy, mobility, and interoperability. This chapter introduces the cross-disciplinary readers to the field of WSNs geared toward its usability in allowing critical communication and synchronization between cooperating robots/machines. A comprehensive description of the various hardware, computing, network and security, and performance requirements and challenges that are associated with machine-to-machine (M2M) WSNs is presented.