Topological addressing enabling energy efficient IoT communication

Abstract

This paper specifies a topological addressing scheme, called Native Short Address (NSA) that enables a more energy efficient IP packet transmission over links in the IoT domain, where it is effective and desirable not to carry full length addresses in the packet (especially large IPv6 addresses). NSA relies on an address assignment function that algorithmically calculates and assigns the address of IoT nodes, based on their roles and location in hierarchy. The small size of the assigned addresses helps lowering the power consumption. Moreover, the main feature of NSA is stateless forwarding, which reduces the computation complexity by eliminating routing calculation, thus making the overall system even more energy efficient. This paper focuses on a low power and lossy network, where the topology of the network is relatively static. The nodes' location is fixed and the connection between nodes is rather stable. The paper illustrates the NSA architecture, address allocation function, forwarding mechanism, header format design, including length-variable fields, and IPv6 interconnection support.