On the Internet of Things » IPv6

6LoWPAN Book Released

zdshelby — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:32:27 +0000

Our 6LoWPAN book has now been released by Wiley. Last week we received the very first copies directly in Japan while at IETF-76. Pre-orders should start arriving any time now to people. At least we are very pleased with the result, so happy reading! For those who would like a preview an excerpt is available on-line:

“6LoWPAN: The Wireless Embedded Internet” – Chapter 1

I will be releasing the book’s companion course slides and exercises very soon at http://6lowpan.net.

IPSO Interop Event

zdshelby — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:26:01 +0000

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.

ZigBee vs. IPv6?

zdshelby — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:17:13 +0000

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