Design Considerations for Low Power Internet Protocols

Abstract

Low-power wireless networks provide IPv6 connectivity through 6LoWPAN, a set of standards to aggressively compress IPv6 packets over small maximum transfer unit (MTU) links such as 802.15.4.The entire purpose of IP was to interconnect different networks, but we find that different 6LoWPAN implementations fail to reliably communicate with one another. These failures are due to stacks implementing different subsets of the standard out of concern for code size. We argue that this failure stems from 6LoWPAN’s design, not implementation, and is due to applying traditional Internet protocol design principles to low- power networks.We propose three design principles for Internet protocols on low-power networks, designed to prevent similar failures in the future. These principles are based around the importance of providing flexible tradeoffs between code size and energy efficiency. We apply these principles to 6LoWPAN and show that the modified protocol provides a wide range of implementation strategies while allowing implementations with different strategies to reliably communicate.