Friday 4 June 2010

6LowPAN: the "Tiny" Internet of Things

It's been a while since I wrote my last post in this blog. My researches on the available wireless technologies have taken some time and I wanted to be really sure before choosing the correct solution for my next projects. Besides, the crisis in the European market has forced me to invest more time in the research of projects for my professional activity. A good number of companies have stopped their investments, mainly in the home automation area, and only those projects with obvious commercial perspectives are being taken ahead. This is specially true in Spain, where I'm supposed to obtain the most part of my contracts.

Back to the original subject of this post, I've been suffering from some bustle, where I used to spend days with any wireless M2M technology that could find a place in the market. Tons of documentations and discussions just to come into these simple conclusions:
  • Choose something open. Avoid chip-locked technologies.
  • Focus only on well supported technologies. Openness becomes useless if only a bunch of people is using such technology.
  • Scalability is something that you'll probably want. If not now, maybe in the future...
  • Pay attention only to those well-constructed standards. Some pseudo-standards are constantly pushed by “commercial forces” so they end by releasing new revisions, not really compatible with the precedent ones.
This said, people from Freaklabs suggested me to look into 6LowPAN as possible technology for my projects. Later talks with wireless M2M specialists confirmed this suggestion so I decided to further investigate this option.

6LowPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) was created by an IETF working group as a way to overcome the current gap between Wireless Low Power and the IP world. Some people may say that this was already achieved by Wi-Fi but this is not true since Wi-Fi is far from being low power. As an example, 6LowPAN allows and promotes the development of wireless IP motes capable to run from a single coin battery for years.

Let's accept that 6LowPAN's concept is quite revolutionary, but how can a low power sensor enter the complex IP cloud? 6LowPAN nodes communicate over 802.15.4 in fact. Then, a smart data compression is done in order to to facilitate the transport of IP data into IEEE 802.15.4 frames. Finally, the 6LowPAN stack shows the way to stablish low power IP communications between wireless nodes and maintaining routing paths between wireless low power and conventional IP networks (Ipv4 and Ipv6). At the end, programming low power IP meshes should be as simple as developing with POSIX sockets from a PC.

Another good point about 6LowPAN is its openness and level of standardization. IETF is behind this movement so this is quite comprehensible. Moreover, 6LowPAN has had the opportunity to learn from other's mistake: no member fees, no royalties, really open and free of use. Unlike other wireless standards, 6LowPAN's philosophy perfectly fits the open source concept. As result, we're assisting to an important number of open initiatives by companies and individuals to bring this technology into real applications.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Yep. I agree. 6LoWPAN has the excellent opportunity to learn from the mistakes of Zigbee, Z-Wave, etc...

It will still take a bit of time to stabilize, but the people working on it are tremendously skilled :)