IPv6 over Cross-Technology Communication with Wake-up Radio

Abstract

A variety of wireless (and wired) technologies are being used to enable Internet of Things (IoT) device connectivity. Two examples of popular technologies in some crucial IoT domains (e.g., smart home, smart factories and smart cities, among others) are IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11. However, IoT devices supporting different wireless technologies are not interoperable without a gateway. One solution to this problem is exploiting bidirectional Cross-Technology Communication with Wake-up Radio (WuR-CTC). Nevertheless, existing WuR-CTC approaches do not support IPv6, and therefore cannot offer full Internet protocol stack interoperability. For the first time to our knowledge, in this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of an adaptation layer to provide IPv6 support over WuR-CTC, by leveraging the IETF Static Context Header Compression and fragmentation (SCHC) framework. Among others, experimental results show that our solution allows transferring a 127-byte IPv6 packet from an IEEE 802.15.4 device to an IEEE 802.11 device, without a gateway, in 69 ms (in average). Therefore, the designed solution supports latency-stringent applications in smart environments, where a human in the loop expects real-time interaction between devices.