6LoWPAN

IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs) works as an adaptation layer in the data link portion of the protocol stack. It adapts wireless standard IEEE 802.15.4 devices to communicate using IPv6. This makes communication over the internet much easier since IP is the lingua franca.

6LoWPAN optimizes the IPv6 datagram transmission over low-power and lossy networks. One of the ways it does this is through header compression. This reduces the addressing information in the data packet down to a few bytes.

Security can be implemented with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-128 encryption at the link layer. Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption can also be used at the transport layer.

Mesh style networks are supported. Devices inside the network use stateless auto configuration where they generate their own IPv6 addresses.

The 6LoWPAN mesh network is connected to the IPv6 internet through an edge router. The edger router has three jobs:

• Local data exchanges between devices in the 6LoWPAN
• Data exchange between the internet and 6LoWPAN devices
• The creation and maintenance of the 6LoWPAN wireless network

6LoWPAN networks are connected to other networks using common IP-based routers. This connectivity can be through any type of linkage such as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or cellular. This makes it simpler to connect to the wider internet than other connectivity options, which require stateful gateway devices in order to communicate to IP networks. Stateful gateway devices are more complicated as they need to remember the communication state and status for each IoT device.

There are two types of device inside a 6LoWPAN network, hosts and routers. Routers can forward datagrams to other devices. Hosts are simply endpoints. They can operate in sleepy states, periodically waking up and checking in with their parent device (router) for new data.