A new white paper is now available from the IPSO Alliance which I wrote together with Samita Chakrabarti from IP Infusion. For someone wanting to understand the Neighbor Discovery solution being developed for use in 6LoWPAN networks this is the best place to start:
“6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery: A High-level Overview”
The course slides for our upcoming 6LoWAN book will be avialable soon on 6lowpan.net, which include tutorial slides about 6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery. Or see a recent tutorial I gave on 6LoWPAN at the SenZations summer school.
For those interested in all the details, see the document in progress in the IETF 6lowpan working group. Here is a link to the latest version of the Internet Draft (released two weeks ago): draft-ietf-6lowpan-nd-05
Enjoy!
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.
We have kicked off a new effort at the IETF called 6LowApp. The goal is to develop application protocols for resource-constrained embedded devices and networks. Now that 6LoWPAN and ROLL are providing a framework for wireless embedded IP networking, the next fronteir is suitable application protocols for discovery, management and data transfer.
IETF 75 (Stockholm) 6LowApp Wiki
Problem Statement Internet-Draft
Please show your support and contibute your ideas for 6LowApp. In Stockholm there will be an informal Bar BOF anyone can attend to show interest and discuss ideas, and you can always show your support on the mailing lists. Keep tuned here, as the process moves forward I’ll keep writing on our progress.
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
A very interesting new standardization effort is now taking off in ETSI. Recently the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Technical Committee was launched, and is aiming to fill a serious gap in today’s standardization of M2M systems and sensor networks (Internet of Things!). Most ETSI information is available to the public, go to the Committee Portal and click on M2M. Recently Sensinode has joined this ETSI group to help with sensor network integration and to help as a laison to IETF 6lowpan and roll. In the EU SENSEI Project we are designing sensor networking as an integral part of the Internet, and we hope to transfer knowledge into the ETSI effort as well.
M2M is loosely defined as the autonomous monitoring and control of machines, usually across the Internet, and mainly for enterprise applications. This is very much a driving force behind the Internet of Things. Today there is very little standardization for M2M in particular. Instead M2M solutions make use of standard Internet, Cellular and Web technologies. Solutions however today are very verticalized, with a major lack of end-to-end application protocols and data representations, standardized interfaces and horizontalization. With the increased demand for remote monitoring, large smart metering deployments and the popularity of wireless embedded and sensor networks – this is a great time for standardizing an end-to-end approach.
The goals of the ETSI M2M committee include:
- To develop and maintain an end-to-end architecture for M2M.
- To indentify gaps in current standardization, and to fill those gaps.
- Work includes sensor network integration, naming, addressing, location, QoS, security, charging, management, application interfaces and hardware interfaces.
- In particular Smart Metering is a major use case, and IETF 6lowpan promising for integration.
The technical committee so-far has a strong end-to-end IP philosophy behind it, so it looks promising as a step towards IoT standardization.
