An Efficient Global Communication Method for 6LoWPAN

Abstract

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, 6LoWPAN, is currently standardizing the IPv6 packet transmission technology in accordance with IEEE 802.15.4. The 6LoWPAN working group has published two RFC documents: RFC 4919 and RFC 4944. Of these, RFC 4944 describes the frame format and simple head compression scheme for the transmission of IPv6 packets. However, the communication method proposed in RFC 4944 involves a high overhead when 6LoWPAN nodes communicate with prefix nodes in external networks. In this paper, we propose a communication mechanism that facilitates efficient communication between 6LoWPAN nodes and external nodes. In this mechanism, gateways convert the address of nodes that have different network prefixes. By means of simulation conducted using QualNet, we compared the performance of our proposed mechanism to that of the original 6LoWPAN method. The results of our comparative analysis show that our proposed mechanism outperforms the method proposed in RFC 4944.