| In a BLIP, pervasive IP has arrived. | | Print | |
| Written by Akiba | |
| Thursday, 02 July 2009 | |
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[Akiba] This article is pretty interesting. I checked out BLIP and it looks like it's a 6LoWPAN implementation for TinyOS. I'm not too familiar with it, so correct me if I'm wrong...[/Akiba] IPv6 was invented in 1998, over ten years ago, yet less than 1% of devices use it. The first answer is "lots of addresses". Think of your PC and the RAM memory inside. Until recently, 32-bit processors were pervasive, and you couldn't put more than 4GB (4 billion bytes) of memory in them because of the limits in 32-bit address spaces. Now most new computers are 64-bit, and they can address 18 quintillion bytes. The Internet will eventually be forced to "upgrade" its address space as well. Currently over 99% of devices use IPv4 which uses 32-bit IP addresses that are most commonly displayed as 4 bytes in decimal: 192.168.1.100. If you want to host a web server to the world, you typically claim a static IP and one of the 4 billion possibilities is yours forever. But the population of the world is 6.7 billion, so there aren't enough to go around! And what if everyone wants multiple devices that can be uniquely addressed to serve some critical information like a cluster of wireless sensor nodes? IPv6 is clearly the answer. It provides a 128-bit address space allowing for over 240 undecillion uniquely addressable devices. To put that in perspective, the soon-to-be 6.8 billion people in the world will each be able to have over 300 million subnets with over 18 quintillion devices in each one. That is a total of over 50 octillion uniquely addressable devices per person! Note: The unallocated address pools in IPv4 are anticipated to be exhausted in 2012.
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  written by adam, July 02, 2009
It is more than an implementation of the 6lowpan adaptation layer, it is a (partial) implementation of an UDP/IPv6 stack. It also has support for the 6lowpan adaptation layer though. There is an initial TCP stack too. This definitely is a step in the right direction for TinyOS.
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 written by jeff, July 02, 2009
And it requires special protocol translation hardware to connect a regular IP network to 6lowpan, so why not use well established technology like IPv4 and NAT or Zigbee gateways. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel.
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 written by Akiba, July 02, 2009
Actually, Zigbee has already announced they'll be moving to IPv6. If this happens and smart meters are using Zigbee, then the smart meters alone would require a couple million IP addresses which is why IPv4 probably wouldn't work out so well. 6LoWPAN came about to actually re-use the established technology, however TCP and IP header compression were required to fit into 802.15.4 frames which are much smaller than ethernet or 802.11 frames.
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written by adam, July 02, 2009
Jeff: No matter how you do it, you always need some way to physically access the radio link. The benefit of using IP is that it gives you an established way to connect the two networks. No custom gateways or protocol translators are needed.
In the Contiki project, which was the first to do IP-based sensor networks, we have been experimenting with different ways to connect the low-power radio network and the fixed IP infrastructure. We have been using a USB stick that works as a network interface in Windows and Linux, seamlessly connecting the two: http://www.sics.se/~adam/mulligan09seamless.pdf We have also been using a bridge device that connects over a USB/serial link: http://contiki.wiki.sourceforg...ng-to-ipv6 (I don't know how the TinyOS folks plan to connect their IPv6 stack with the fixed IP infrastructure though.) report abuse
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