IPv6 Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) for Networking Internet of Things (IoT) – Analyzing its Suitability for IoT

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Internet of Things (IoT) is going to govern the future world where all devices will be connected with each-other. The expectation with the Internet of Things is that the increase in number of devices going to be truly dramatic. Method: With the increase in the number of devices, the amount of traffic will grow together with data. IoT will have huge number of power sensitive smaller devices and they're going to put significant constraint on the total bandwidth of the system. This paper analyses how 6LoWPAN, a practical developed for resource constrained IP based systems suitable for Internet of Things with respect to Internet Protocol. Findings/Applications: Internet protocols used to be fine-tuned, modified, changed to be able to accommodate the era of Internet of Things. 6LoWPAN has different features like, support for 64 bit or 16-bit addressing, targeted at low power networks including Bluetooth low energy, header compression for IPv base as well as for UDP headers, network auto configuration and neighbor discovery, support for multicast, unicast, and broadcast, supporting the concept of fragmentation. This makes 6LoWPAN a best suited protocol for IoT.