Theoretical analysis of IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration in Low-power and Lossy Wireless Networks

Low-power and Lossy Wireless Networks (LLN) is a crucial enabling technology for a broad range of applications that will touch everybody´s life and be driving forces for new businesses. Example of the rapidly emerging application domains are the Internet of Things, Smart Cities and Smart Homes. Recently, there is strong effort to provide LLN with IP connectivity. Supporting IP provides interoperability with existing IP devices and infrastructure together with the access to a large panel of tools for diagnostic, management and commissioning. However, enabling such solutions on LLN requires to optimize the IP communication stack. Among the features introduced by IP, the stateless address autoconfiguration is of particular importance as the success of IP is largely because of its ability to connect together networks of different sizes and types. In this article, we propose a complete evaluation of the stateless address autoconfiguration in LLN. Our theoretical analysis is based on neighbor discovery optimizations especially designed for LLN.