Evaluation of IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks implementations

A common radio technology used in wireless sensor networks is the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Wireless sensor networks have so far used custom, light-weight, and application specific network protocols on top of IEEE 802.15.4, often optimized for resource constrained low power hardware. In order to achieve interoperability at the network layer, the Internet Engineering Task Force published a standard for the transmission of IPv6 packets over IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless personal area networks, which provides an additional layer adapting the IPv6 network layer to the low power and resource constrained IEEE 802.15.4 link layer. This paper provides an evaluation of several independent implementations of the IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 standard. We describe the characteristics of the implementations and the protocol features supported. Our interoperability tests, carried out using two different hardware platforms, show that at least three implementations are to a large extend compatible with each other. At the end of the paper, we summarize recent work in the IETF to improve the IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 technology.