6LowPAN

[Daniel Berenguer <dberenguer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For those among you having never heart about this technology, 6LowPAN
(IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) is an IETF
initiative to transport IPv6 packets over IEEE 802.15.4. The working
group was started in 2007 and has now achieved a good level of
completion. Unlike Zigbee, 6LowPAN is mainly focusing on how data has
to be compressed and transported, not in application profiles.
However, a new working group called 6LowApp is being defining an
abstract schema to transmit data on top of 6LowPAN. Some of the
6LowApp gurus are even encouraging other protocols (even Zigbee) to
take 6LowPAN as a lower technology for the 802.15.4 comms. However, I
personally think that the 6LowApp initiative will end up by defining
app profiles before the Zigbee Alliance takes such decision.

One of the good thing about 6LowPAN is that any low power RF node can
behave as any other IP node within a LAN or WAN. With the development
of new 6LowPAN routers, a software guy will be able to communicate
with simple temperature sensors without having to know anything about
802.15.4 nor RF, just using standard UDP frames from the IP network.

I just wanted to share this with you. Maybe we could dream in a xAP
implementation for 6LowPAN in the future :-)

Link to a basic 6LowPAN tutorial:
http://www.archrock.com/downloads/resources/6LoWPAN-tutorial.pdf

--
Daniel Berenguer
http://www.usapiens.com
http://www.opnode.org


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