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Procedia Technology 25 (2016) 513 – 519

Global Colloquium in Recent Advancement and Effectual Researches in Engineering, Science and
Technology (RAEREST 2016)

Development of 6LoWPAN in Embedded Wireless System

Amitha Chalappuram#,Sreesh P R##,Juney M George##
#
P G Scholar, Dept. of ECE, St. Joseph’s College of Engineering & Technology, Palai,Kerala,India
##
Asst. Prof., Dept. of ECE, St. Joseph’s College of Engineering & Technology, Palai, Kerala, India

Abstract

In the proposed system, implementation of the low power sensor nodes is proposed. 6LoWPAN is an
acronym of IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Network was developed to enable the Wireless Embedded
Internet by simplifying IPv6 functionality, defining very compact header formats and taking the nature of wireless
networks into account. Our solution contains two types of nodes Wireless Sensor Node and Border Router/Gateway
Node. Wireless Sensor Node: These nodes have sensors integrated and are used to gather the information and send to
the Border Router/Gateway Node. They create a mesh network among them, forwarding the packets of other nodes in
order to make the information reach the Border Router/Gateway Node. Each Wireless Sensor Node is equipped with
a 6LoWPAN (802.15.4) radio, sensors and a battery. It can be either a microcontroller based or Linux based embedded
platforms. Border Router/Gateway Node: This node takes the information sent by the Wireless Sensor Nodes and
sends it to the Tunneling IPv4 / IPv6 server by using the Ethernet IPv4 interface. Each Border Router/Gateway Node
is equipped with a Linux based Single Board Computer, 6LoWPAN (802.15.4) radio and an Ethernet interface and a
battery.
©©2016
2015TheTheAuthors.
Authors. Published
Published by by Elsevier
Elsevier Ltd.Ltd.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of RAEREST 2016.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of RAEREST 2016
Keywords: 6LoWPAN,IPv4, IPv6

1. Introduction

In today’s world to provide internet based services to wireless sensor node there are wide range of
technologies available but are difficult to integrate with larger networks. Some 40 years after it was created to connect
computers to one another and allow file transfer, remote login, and access to distant computation, we find
computational processing embedded in almost every device, machine, appliance, and instrument. And, they are

2212-0173 © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of the organizing committee of RAEREST 2016
doi:10.1016/j.protcy.2016.08.139
514 Amitha Chalappuram et al. / Procedia Technology 25 (2016) 513 – 519

increasingly able to communicate. These Bhosts hardly resemble their classic Internet forbearers, and rather than the
human-generated information and documents that are exchanged over the classic Web, these deeply embedded
computers present physical information sensor readings, observations, actions, and events that occur over time at
particular points in the real world. The web of real world data is used to optimize production, improve safety, and
reduce energy consumption, waste, and pollution. The emergence of this new tier of the Internet has largely been
enabled by a decade or so of intense research on low-power wireless embedded networks, or sensornets. But early on,
that thrust explicitly eschewed the design principles and constraints of the Internet architecture, arguing that
conventional layering was impractical for the resource constrained devices that were being embedded in the physical
world; that the underlying physical communication structure was essential to applications that would utilize such
information and should not be abstracted away; and that without a human being in close attendance, these devices
would need to configure themselves into networks without manual intervention. Ironically, this freedom of thought
produced innumerable good ideas locked away in disjoint, no interoperable little stovepipes with little opportunity to
impact the real world. At the same time, portions of the Internet design community were pushing on these very issues
of accommodating huge numbers of hosts, auto configuration, and extensibility to embrace unanticipated innovation
in IP version 6.

Each Wireless Sensor Node is equipped with a 6LoWPAN (802.15.4) radio, sensors and a battery. It can be
either a microcontroller based or Linux based embedded platforms. Border Router/Gateway Node: This node takes
the information sent by the Wireless Sensor Nodes and sends it to the Tunneling IPv4 / IPv6 server by using the
Ethernet IPv4 interface. Each Border Router/Gateway Node is equipped with a Linux based Single Board Computer,
6LoWPAN (802.15.4) radio and an Ethernet interface and a battery

2. Related Work

2.1 6LoWPAN

Low bandwidth, low-power resources and the maximum link-layer packet size of 127 bytes are the most
relevant characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 [2] standard. Implementing standard IPv6 headers over LoWPAN
would result in extremely small payloads for higher-level protocols The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is broadly
accepted as the PHY and MAC layer protocol for WSN. The network layer protocol must comply with the
constraints imposed by the lower layer protocol in use. In fact, the requirements of the IPv6 protocol don’t fully
match with the IEEE 802.15.4 constraints. MTU is 127 bytes. Beside to this incompatibility, using standard IPv6
headers would result in extremely small payload for high protocols. To address these issues, the IETF 6LoWPAN-
working group were created to define the support of IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4.
The 6LoWPAN [5] working group were mainly focused on the following items: i) to define limited
extensions to IPv6 neighbour discovery protocol more adapted for WSN; ii) to describe mechanisms to compress
6LoWPAN headers and iii) to define 6LoWPAN routing approaches and protocols adapted to WSN characteristics.
Instead of defining a single header, like IPv4, the 6LoWPAN use stacked headers as the original IPv6 protocol
does. In this case, it does not need to use unnecessary header fields for mesh networking or fragmentation and it
uses only the minimum necessary headers. The 6LoWPAN standard defines four header types: i) the dispatch
header, ii) the IPv6 header compression header, iii) the fragmentation header, and iv) the mesh header. In the
simplest case, only the dispatch and compression headers are used. At the beginning of each header, a header type
field identifies the header format.

3. Proposed System.

The proposed system includes realization of communication based on the cc2520 and 6LoWPAN subsystem
on a cheap and low power embedded platform supporting Linux.The term 6LoWPAN is referred to WPAN network
having IPV6 based protocols. As most of the networks deployed are based on IPV4 there is a need to interoperate
legacy IPV4 with newly introduced IPV6 network.
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6LoWPAN protocol does two operations on IPV6, encapsulation and header compression so that IPv6
compliant packets can be transmitted and received from the IEEE 802.15.4 based network. There are two types of
node in such network, viz. end node and gateway. End node is composed of 6LoWPAN compliant radio, sensors and
also battery for power. The end node collects the information and send them to the gateway i.e. it basically creates the
mesh network. Gateway takes the information from end node and passes it to IPv4/IPv6 server using Ethernet
interface. Gateway is composed of 6LoWPAN radio.

3.1 Advantages of Proposed System

• IPv6 offers the potential to build a much more powerful Internet.

• IPv6 provides better end to end connectivity than IPv4.
• IPv6 has better ability for auto configuring devices than IPv4.
• IPv6 contains simplified Header Structures leading to faster routing as compared to IPv4.
• IPv6 provides better security than IPv4 for applications and networks.
• IPv6 gives better Quality of Service (QoS) than IPv4.

4. Implementation Description

4.1 Network Topology

The unequal properties of IPv6 and IEEE 802.15.4 cause many requirements to the 6LoWPAN protocol,
which have to be considered in order that the underlying network still fulfils the needs of a modern WSN.4919. The
most important characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard are its low bandwidth, the requirements for low power
and the maximum link layer packet size of 127 bytes. Implementing IPv6 unaltered over 802.15.4 would result in
extremely small packet payloads for higher-level protocols as the following calculation shows. According to IEEE
802.15.4-2006, in the worst case the maximum size of an IEEE 802.15.4 frame is 88 bytes. The IPv6 header has a size
of 40 bytes, which results in 41 bytes for upper-layer protocols like TCP or UDP. The length of the TCP header is
another 20 bytes.
Thus, only 28 bytes per packet are available for application-layer protocols. The sensor nodes uses the
6LoWPAN protocol over the 802.15.4 link layer to create a mesh network which interconnects any device in the
network with the Gateway (GW).

• Once the GW takes the 6LoWPAN packets, it changes the IP header to IPv4 while keeping the UDP transport layer.

• Then it sends the information to the IPv4 / IPv6 Tunneling machine which will change header to a the
proper IPv6 format and will send the information to IPv6 Servers located on the Internet, where users are
connected

Fig.1.Implementation structure of 6LoWPAN

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5. Work Flow

The proposed system includes realization of communication based on the cc2520 and 6LoWPAN subsystem on a
cheap and low power embedded platform supporting Linux. The term 6LoWPAN is referred to WPAN network having
IPV6 based protocols. By default Raspberry Pi comes with Raspbian image free OS.There will be no 6LoWPAN
support.

Fig.2. Default ifconfig-without 6LoWPAN

5.1 Preparation Of Linux SPC

x Taken a Linux kernel which was 4.0 version.

x Added the configuration support for 6LoWPAN IEEE 802.15.4

Fig.3. Linux Kernel Configuration

x Configure the rest of the kernel for RPI.

x Then after the compilation integrated cc252 driver and modified some pin configuration.
x Prepared U-Boot for Raspberry Pi
x Downloaded bare U-Boot and customize it for Rpi which enable Rpi to boot from SD card.
x Modified device tree file for enabling cc2520 pin or to enable SPI communication.
x After this much work we loaded kernel U-Boot and device tree file into SD card and made Raspberry Pi up
and running.
 Amitha Chalappuram et al. / Procedia Technology 25 (2016) 513 – 519 517

Fig.4. 6LoWPAN Support

6. Results and Discussions

6.1. Configuration of IEEE 802.15.4 layer

We will configure the two devices to use the PAN ID 0x0777, the hardware addresses a0::1 and a0::2, and the short
addresses 0x8001 and 0x8002. Then, we will give them IPv6 addresses and test 6loWPAN communication with
standard GNU tools.

Fig.5.Configuration of IEEE 802.15.4 layer

6.2. Configuration of the 6loWPAN layer

By using the 6loWPAN protocol on top (the lowpower equivalent of the IPv6 protocol), we can allow standard
Linux network applications to communicate over the IEEE 802.15.4 link with standard sockets.
518 Amitha Chalappuram et al. / Procedia Technology 25 (2016) 513 – 519

Fig.6. Configuration of 6LoWPAN Layer

x Testing the communication

For first node

root:/> ping6 2001:db8:dead:beef::2

Fig.7. Communication for First Node

x For second node

root :/> ping6 2001:db8:dead:beef::1
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Fig.8. Communication for Second Node

7. Conclusion

Implemented a 6LoWPAN node using an embedded linux platform and a low power 802.15.4 radio. The
main advantages of using IPv6 in sensor node networks was that it enables the use of standard networking tools, which
were originally developed for the Internet, also for WSNs. Furthermore, it simplifies the task of interlinking WSNs
over the Internet, as there was no need for an advanced gateway . The packets can simply be forwarded on the link-
layer. IPv6 is important for the long-term development of the Internet, but a switch to IPv6 is almost impossible as
long as most services are not offered over IPv6.

Acknowledgement

First and foremost, we give thanks to Almighty God who gave us the inner strength, resource and ability to
complete our work successfully, without which all our efforts would have been in vain.
We thank all the lectures and lab assistants who have helped us with their inspiration and co-operation. We
truly admire our parents and friends for their constant encouragement and enduring support which was inevitable for
the success of our venture.

References

[1] Zach Shelby, Marti Huttunen,”6LoWPAN: The Wireless Embedded Internet Companion Exercise”, Wiley 2009

[2] IEEE Std 802.15.4-2006. Part 15.4: wireless medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY)
specifications for low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs). IEEE Std. 802.15.4-2006, 2006.

[3] https://www.libelium.com/products/waspmote-moterunner-6lowpan/.

[4] http://lab11.eecs.umich.edu/wiki/doku.php?id=proj:rpibr:start.

[5] Warren Gay, "Mastering the Raspberry Pi”copyright at 2014,ISBN-13(pbk).

[6] J. P. C. Rodrigues and P. A. C. S. Neves, “A Survey on IP-based Wireless Sensor Networks Solutions”, in
International Journal of Communication Systems, Wiley, ISSN: 1074-5351, Vol. 23, No. 8,963-981.