6LoWPAN

MARTIN ABRAHAM ________________________________________________________________________

6LoWPAN is an adapter between IEEE 802.15.4 and Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6). As a result it enables interoperability between wireless embedded devices and common internet devices using standard protocols. This paper provides an overview of the IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Area Networks (6LoWPAN) protocols basic concepts. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design: Wireless communication General Terms: Theory and Design Additional Key Words and Phrases: 6LoWPAN, WSN, IPv6, IEEE 802.15.4

________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION Since the mid of the 90ies intensive research is done in the field of wireless embedded systems or wireless sensor networks (WSN). Closely related to WSN is the upcoming paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT requires global scalable WSNs. However current technologies like Z-Wave or ZigBee focus on ad-hoc or isolated networking and cannot fulfil this need. 6LoWPAN tries to enable usage of long-lived IP technologies in todays WSNs. This facilitates integration of WSNs in the free-to-use Internet infrastructure. Thus, 6LoWPAN is an enabler for gobal scale WSNs and the IoT. This paper gives a brief introduction into problems of using IP in WSNs and how 6LoWPAN tries to solve them. If not marked otherwise, the RFCs 4919 (Kushalnagar et al., 2007) and 4944 (Montenegro, et al . 2007), which describe 6LoWPAN, can be assumed as reference. First this paper explains what embedded devices and wireless embedded devices are. It provides a brief history of protocols used in WSNs. Then it outlines the advantages and problems of using IPv6 in WSNs. In the following 6LoWPAN is introduced as possible solution for the problems mentioned before. Finally major aspects are summarized.

2. EMBEDDED DEVICES AND WIRELESS EMBEDDED DEVICES Embedded devices (ED) are subsystems dedicated to a specific task within a larger computer system. The specialization reduces their cost and size. Compared to generalpurpose computers ED can support higher performance and reliability at a specific task. However their memory and processing power is sometimes very contrained (Simon, 1999, p. 8-11).

Not only are they used in industrial automation, logistics, building automation, enviromental monitoring, but they are also integrated into everyday consumer products like VCRs, digital watches, automobile engines. Today embedded devices are ubiquitous. Wireless embedded devices (WED) are a subset of embedded devices. The devices have a very small form-factor and are designed with energy efficiency in mind, because they are powered by battery or other independent energy sources like piezoelectric generators. This design implies limited hardware resources and limited network capabilities. It means in effect that the devices have low processing power, usually 8- or 16-bit microcontroller or digital signal processors (DSP), and little memory. Usage of low-power radio technologies such as 802.15.4 implies short range of networking, low bandwidth and short message-sizes. Because of their size and mobility they can be attached to movable goods like parcels or can be carried by people around in their hand, pocket or purse (Pawlan, 2001). Thus WED extend the field of applications where EB can be used. Also wireless communication technologies makes usage scenarios more dynamic and reduce the set of effort and costs.

3. PROTOCOL HISTORY OF WIRELESS EMBEDDED DEVICES Up to the mid of the 90s wired embedded devices were used in most fields of automation and monitoring. Then the US Government funded research for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and initiated an academic movement in this field. At the start the research focused in usage of WSN for military and security tasks. Later the field of applications spreaded. Up to approximately 20 proprietary low-power embedded wireless radio and networking technologies arised. This has fragmented the market and slowed down the deployment of such technology. (Shelby & Bormann, 2011, p. 2). At that time networks were thought to be isolated. (Shelby & Bormann, 2011, p. 9) Thus no Internet compatibility or standards were used. In 2003, with ZigBee, the first open standard for wireless embedded communication was introduced. All these technologies, focused on isolated (and ad-hoc) networking, are vertically bound to a specific data-link layer (L2) and do not provide interoperability, scalability and also cant be easily integrated in existing Internet-based infrastructures .

4. USAGE OF IPV6 IN WSN Internet Protocol (IP) is the dominant Network Layer protocol of the Internet. It was introduced in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and is a long-lived standard. The usage of IP in WSNs has many advantages. IP has the ability to connect heterogeneous networks, and provides a worldwide free-touse infrastructure which enables global scalability. Unlike earlier versions of the protocol Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) provides enough addressing space for future usage scenarios. The 128-bit addressing scheme contains over 3.4*10^38 possible combinations which provide an IP address for every grain of sand on the planet (Hagen 2009, p. 4). Also, there exists a great number of IP related tools for diagnostics, network management etc. Thus IPv6 is a perfect foundation for the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT).

5. PROBLEMS OF USAGE OF IPV6 IN WSN However there are some problems to solve for usage of IP in this area. WSN technologies are designed with energy efficiency in mind. Most WSNs build on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard (802.15.4), which specifies a physical layer and a data-link layer for low-speed and low-cost communication between nearby devices. 802.15.4 has a power consumption of 1mW and provides a bandwith of 250kbps. Other wireless standards like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth do not meet the requirements of WSNs, mostly because of their energy consumption. Thus switching to another L1/L2 technology is non-essential. The major problems of using IPV6 over 802.15.4 are: Frame Fragmentation The minimum frame size (MTU) of an IPv6 packet is 1280 bytes. IEEE 802.15.4 is a lossy network and suffers under high bit error rates and failure proneness. Thus the maximum frame size is limited to 127 bytes in 802.15.4. To transmit IPv6 packets over IEEE 802.15.4 there needs to be a mechanism which fragments IPv6 packets. Header compression Transmitting full UDP- and IPv6-headers via 802.15.4 reduces the payload size of frames significantly. It is reduced to 53 bytes, which is less than 50%. IPv6-headers fill 40 bytes, UPD-headers 8 byte and underlying MAC-headers 21 byte.

Mobility Protocols for WSNs have to deal with different kinds of mobility. Mobility is caused by physical movement, power and duty cycles of nodes and network or node failures. Because nodes are often attached to moving goods or are carried by people or animal support for mobility is mandatory. Micro mobility describes a switch of a node inside the same network domain. Node mobility describes a switch of a node between different WSNs, e.g. attached to a parcel. Network mobility describes situations where a full WSN changes its backhaul link. Efficiency of Transport Layer and Application Layer Protocols Standard Transport Layer (L4) and Application Layer (L5) protocols must be reviewed with a focus on energy efficiency. L4 protocols like TCP and protocols based on TCP deal with wireless packet lost in an inefficient way. L5 protocols like HTTP waste expensive bandwith in WSNs. Support of offline devices IP assumes that devices are always on, but embedded devices may not because of their power and duty cycles. Missing Multicast support IEEE 802.15.4 and other low-power radios do not support Multicast, because it is energy inefficient. However Multicast is a fundamental feature of IP.

6. IPV6 OVER LOW POWER WIRELESS AREA NETWORKS IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Area Networks (6LoWPAN) provides an adapter between IEEE 802.15.4 and IPv6 and enables the usage of IPv6 by wireless embedded devices. In the following it will be shown how 6LoWPAN solves the major related problems. Frame Fragmentation 6LoWPAN splits IPv6 datagrams into fragments that fit into IEEE 802.4.15 frames. Therefor it introduces the three fragmentation headers datagram-size, datagram-tag and datagram-offset. The datagram-size header has a size of 11 bits and can store values up to 2047, which is big enough to hold the IPv6 MTU of 1280 (bytes). It is transmitted in every fragment.

Thus the destination can reserve memory for the whole message on first arrival of a packet. The datagram-tag has a size of 16 bits and stores a unique id for every fragment. The short length is sufficient because of the limited link speed. In WSNs the first repeat of a tag will occur after a minimum of 4 minutes. The datagram-offset has a size of 8 bits and addresses the IPv6 datagram offset in 8-byte units. The value can represent offsets up to 2047 (bytes), which is big enough to hold offsets needed by IPv6 MTU. Longer messages will be handled by the standard IP fragmentation on L3. IPv6 Header compression 6LoWPAN uses stateless header compression to keep algorithms simple and failsafe. It reduces L3 header sizes by omission of redundant and unnessecary information. Redundant are headers that can be reconstructed from L2 information. Unnessecary are headers, which are not needed or used in the given context. The two major parts of 6LoWPAN header compression strategy are the IP header compression (HC1) and the UDP header compression (HC2). In this paper HC1 is explained in detail.

Figure 1 - 6LoWPAN frame before and after header compression HC1 provides the greatest savings. The biggest segment of the 40 byte IP header contains the IPv6 source and destination addresses. Each addresses has a size of 128 bits or 16 bytes. An IPv6 address consists of a 64-bit prefix followed by a 64 bit interface id (IID). HC1 exploits that all nodes in a Personal Area Network (PAN) share a single IPv6 prefix. This prefix can be omitted, because the PAN ID unambiguously maps to the prefix. Furthermore HC1 exploits that the IID can be regenerated from EUID64, that is contained

in L2 headers. Also unneeded IPv6 headers like the version header and the flow label header are omitted because they are not needed in the context of WSN. Figure 1 illustrates the best case of header compression. In the best case the payload size can be increased from 53 bytes to 108 bytes after header compression. Mobility 6LoWPAN handles the all types of mobility in different ways and tries to exploit their characteristics. Most kinds of mobility require active data flows to be restarted. In the following network mobility, micro-mobility and macro-mobility are described. In case of network mobility just the IPv6 Prefix of a PAN changes. Like described under IP header compression the edge router is the only device which knows about the IPv6 prefix. For nodes into a PAN, everything remains the same. Thus all changes can be handled by the edge router, which connects the LoWPAN to the backbone. For micro-mobility 6LoWPAN does not provide any ready solutions till now. Usage of well-known technologies used by UMTS conflicts with IEEE 802.15.4s principles. All topologic changes should be handled node-controlled (Shelby & Bormann, 2011, p. 9596). The simplest solution is to restart networking on switching. Macro mobility involves a switch of a node between LoWPANs. This switch is always associated with a change of the nodes IPv6 address. Like for micro-mobility a simple restart of the nodes networking is the simplest solution. However for server applications running on nodes Mobile IPv6 provides solutions (Shelby & Bormann, 2011, p. 95). Efficiency of Transport Layer and Application Layer Protocols The TCP protocol has been removed from the list of supported L4 protocols, because of its inefficient concerning WSNs. It is optimized for reliability and produces a lot of overhead, thus is not suitable for WSNs. Other problems 6LoWPAN redesigns the bootstrapping process. It adds the role of the Edge Router (ER) to the network topology and introduces the ICMPv6 messages Node Registration (NR) and Node Confirmation (NC). ERs manage a whiteboard of registered devices and also take over Duplicate Address Detection (DAD). Nodes register themselves via NR to the ER. ERs confirm registration via NC. Thus 6LoWPAN does not need multicast for bootstrapping.

To deal with power and duty cycles, communication in 6LoWPAN is node-initiated. If a nodes wakes up, it registers at the ER using NR and tries to receive or send data.

7. CONCLUSION 6LoWPAN is an open standard. It provides an adapter between IEEE 802.15.4 (L1/2) and IPv6 (L3) and enables interoperability between WED itself and between WED and common Internet devices using standard protocols. It fosters standardization of communication in scope of wireless embedded devices and provides an important foundation for the Internet of Things (IoT).

REFERENCES Kushalnagar, N., Montenegro, G., & Schumacher, C. (2007). IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs): Overview, Assumptions, Problem Statement, and Goals. Request for Comments, 4919. Montenegro, G., Kushalnagar, N., Hui, J., & Culler, D. (2007). Transmission of IPv6 Packets over IEEE 802.15.4 Networks. Request for Comments, 4944. Shelby, Z., & Bormann, C. (2011). 6LoWPAN: The Wireless Embedded Internet. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Simon, D. E. (1999). An Embedded Software Primer (Bd. 1). Boston: Addison Wesley. Hagen, S. (2009). IPv6: Grundlagen- Funktionalitt- Integration. Maur, CH: Sunny Connection AG. Pawlan, M. (2001). Introduction to Wireless Technologies. Sun Developer Network,. Retrieved from http://developers.sun.com/mobility/getstart/articles/intro/
This research arose within the context of the seminar Current Internet and Web Developments headed by Prof. Dr. Stefan Fischer. Authors' addresses: Martin Abraham, Kuckuckruf 41, 23562 Lbeck, Germany, mabraham@mabraham.de Permission to make digital/hard copy of part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date of appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. 2001 ACM 1073-0516/01/0300-0034 $5.00