I find sports, wellbeing and tourism to be really exciting, down-to-earth applications for Internet of Things technology. These are applications that touch people’s everyday lives and are easy to relate to. The ultimate sport application is of course the Olympics.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics were an incredible showcase for Internet technology. The event was 100% IPv6, included embedded IPv6 cameras, building automation systems, taxi monitoring and mobile devices for staff – the largest production IPv6 deployment to date, and an exciting IPv6 IoT experiment as well. Hats of to the Chinese organizers’ IT team, great work. Read more technical details here.
The 2014 Sochi Winter Olypics hosted in Russia, will be the ultimate showcase for embedded IPv6 and 6LoWPAN technology. Finland is known for supplying Russia with building and technology experience, and Sochi will be no exception. Snowpolis, a leading wellbeing, sport and winter technology park (where my office is) – has been elected to coordinate the Finnish effort to bid on Sochi contracts for building the sport and tourism infrastructure needed there. Sochi is currently a village in southern Russia. Almost the entire transportation, tourism and sport infrastructure needs to be built from scratch. I am excited to be working with Snowpolis in this process, on the exciting array of 6LoWPAN applications possible at Sochi. If you have ideas where low-power IPv6 could be applied at the 2014 Olympics, I’d love to hear them!
Something is bothering me. I keep hearing that ZigBee and 6LoWPAN are competing technologies. The ZigBee Alliance has taken a stand to force such a confrontation. Its like comparing apples and, well, New York 
6LoWPAN = IPv6 = The Internet
Think about it. The Internet… the most successfull, innovative, massive network ever created. Now what was that Zig thing called again? Does anyone even remember the proprietary, link-specific networking protocols from the 90s?
Here is why ZigBee is not competetive, and shouldn’t be compared to 6LoWPAN and IPv6:
- ZigBee = small-scale isolated ad-hoc networking. 6LoWPAN = massively scalable networking as an end-to-end part of the Internet, it is IPv6!
- ZigBee = limited to a single radio standard. 6LoWPAN = applicable to any low-power, low-rate wireless radio (or even wired! See Watteco). IP protocols tie together heterogeneous networks.
- The only good part of ZigBee is application protocol profiles. And guess what, there is an IETF specification for using ZigBee profiles over UDP/IP. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-tolle-cap-00.txt
- ZigBee is not a standard, it is a special interest group. Will it be around in a few years? The IETF produces open, long-lived, standards. IPv6 will be around for 20+ years.
- Large-scale enterprise automation, M2M, metering systems etc. require end-to-end addressing, security, mobility, traffic multiplexing, reusability, maintainability, and web-services which are globally scalable… this is the kind of thing IPv6 was designed for.
I only see one option for ZigBee, and that is to get properly networked. I bet soon we’ll be seeing something called ZigBee/IP 2010.
ZigBee over UDP/IPv6
Welcome to On the Internet of Things.
The purpose of this blog, is to keep people informed on what is happening in Internet of Things standardization, technology and business from an insider’s view. I have the pleasure of watching a technical and business revolution in the Internet happen from the inside, as a day job! As an early researcher in embedded IP, and later starting the world’s first 6LoWPAN networking company Sensinode, the last decade has been extremely interesting. The great part is that this was only the beginning. Activities in the IETF, the new IPSO Alliance, and a business awakening to embedded IP and WSN technology are starting to make the Internet of Things a reality.
Through this blog I will be sharing the inside story on Internet of Things developments through my activities at Sensinode, the IETF, the IPSO Alliance, the SENSEI project, open-source projects, and a touch of common sense opinion.
Enjoy!
Zach Shelby
