I attended the 75th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Stockholm last week. Here is some of the latest news from IETF activities related to the Internet of Things:
6LoWPAN - The 6lowpan working group is currently moving four Internet-Drafts towards last call in the standards track (Improved Header Compression, 6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery) and informational track (Use Cases, Routing Requirements). I presented the latest ND draft, which has good consensus and will be going through a round of technical improvements within 2 weeks. Next the WG is looking to re-charter to continue on subjects such as security, MIBs etc.
ROLL – The roll working group presented the RPL (pronounced “ripple”) routing protocol draft, which has been accepted as an official working group document today. This will be the basis for routing over low-power and lossy networks including 6LoWPAN, which still needs lots of contribution to reach a full solution.
New 6lowapp effort - We held a very successful meeting about applications in resource-constrained networks. About 60-70 people attended presentations from Carsten Bormann, Don Sturek (from Pacific Gas & Electric and ZigBee/IP) along with a set of 2-minute stand-ups. The presentation is available here. The feedback from IETF Area Directors was that there is obvious support, motivation and requirements (and that we are in a hurry) – so start working! A 6lowapp mailing list and wiki page will be coming soon, keep tuned.
There was a great presence at the IETF from IPSO members, who held several meetings during the same week. Thanks to the move of ZigBee and the energy industry towards all-IP smart energy we say many new participants in Stockholm. It is really positive to see the collaboration between the IETF, IPSO, ZigBee and Utilities in this area.
This week the IP Smart Object Alliance converged in Las Vegas for a live global interop event at Networld / Interop 2009. In addition to a stand in Las Vegas with live wireless embedded sensor devices and routers, tens of companies from all over the world participated live by connecting devices from their remote sites to a visualization application server provided by SAP running in France. This event showed that 6LoWPAN, IPv6 and IPv4 devices from around the world could be globally interoperable without the use of complex gateways.
As an active IPSO promoter it was exciting to watch the interop event preperation and excitement both in Sensinode’s engineering team and at a huge range of member companies. Our CTO, Mikko Saarnivala attending the event in person. Most interesting is the wide variety of companies involved with IPSO from chip makers, network providers, backend systems, system integrators and even end-users. So congradulations to IPSO on the successful event! The alliance just hit 50 members and will have its first anniversary this summer. Next I am looking forward to a next stage in interop, where multi-vendor 6LoWPAN networks are tested over-the-air and over the backbone using the latest HC and ND specifications.
Last week the ZigBee Alliance made a ground-breaking announcement -
ZigBee Alliance Plans Further Integration of Internet Protocol Standards
What this means in practice is that future versions of ZigBee specifications will incorporate IETF 6LoWPAN and ROLL IPv6 standards. In practice the most straight-forward way to achieve this is by adapting the ZigBee Application Layer (ZAL) over UDP, as specified in http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-tolle-cap-00.txt.
I am very excited about this – and believe this is a win-win for the whole industry. This lets the ZigBee Alliance, IPSO, the IETF and the IEEE (802.15.4) work in the same direction with much greater impact on achieving the Internet of Things. My own bet was that we would see ZigBee/IP in 2010 – great that it came a year early!
According to the press release and what I have seen happening in the industry – ZigBee has received a lot of pressure from the energy industry and chip makers to take advantage of native IP technology. This recent ZigBee alliance with Homeplug surely helped the decision as well. Texas Instruments was the first chip maker to make a press release with their strong support of ZigBee’s announcement, here at Sensinode we’re proud to be TI’s 3rd party partner for IP networking -
Texas Instruments supports ZigBee Alliance plan to integrate Internet Protocol standards for smart energy applications
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
