Currently, I'm jus starting 6LoWPAN Project. Also I have The 6LoWPAN Devkit from Sensinode gives me the hardware for getting started with development work.
I have several problem to cover regarding the 6LoWPAN project:
1. Since we need to assign each sensor node with IPv6 Address
- how can we distribute IPv6 prefix to each sensor node
- is the IPv6 ID generated from 64 bits MAC Address of Sensor node.
2. Grouping the sensor nodes, How we can group a set of node into one group so then we can identify that a sensor node is belong to one group.
Please update us some information regarding these issues
Thanks
zeldi
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The beauty of 6lowpan (please read RFC4944) is that the IPv6 prefixes are not needed inside the 6lowpan network itself. In fact 99% of the time the IPv6 addresses are compressed away completely (this is what 6lowpan does). Therefore you don't need to assign addresses to nodes at all. They simply use the 802.15.4 64-bit IEEE address already assigned to the node. There is a command in NanoStack to see the MAC address of the node, it is flashed on the node during manufacturing.
When a 6lowpan packet leaves the 802.15.4 network through a gateway router, that router expands the packet to a full IPv6 packet and forms addresses by adding its own 64-bit prefix.
Regarding grouping, this is something you should do at the application layer. I.e, build such a group identification into the framing you do over UDP. Another way to do that is use a common UDP port for a group of nodes.
There is theoretically multicast support in 6lowpan RFC4944 which could be used to multicast traffic to a particular group of nodes. We don't have that implemented in NanoStack right now, maybe something to work on if anyone finds it useful or interesting now.
- Zach
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hi All,
Currently, I'm jus starting 6LoWPAN Project. Also I have The 6LoWPAN Devkit from Sensinode gives me the hardware for getting started with development work.
I have several problem to cover regarding the 6LoWPAN project:
1. Since we need to assign each sensor node with IPv6 Address
- how can we distribute IPv6 prefix to each sensor node
- is the IPv6 ID generated from 64 bits MAC Address of Sensor node.
2. Grouping the sensor nodes, How we can group a set of node into one group so then we can identify that a sensor node is belong to one group.
Please update us some information regarding these issues
Thanks
zeldi
Hi Zeldi,
The beauty of 6lowpan (please read RFC4944) is that the IPv6 prefixes are not needed inside the 6lowpan network itself. In fact 99% of the time the IPv6 addresses are compressed away completely (this is what 6lowpan does). Therefore you don't need to assign addresses to nodes at all. They simply use the 802.15.4 64-bit IEEE address already assigned to the node. There is a command in NanoStack to see the MAC address of the node, it is flashed on the node during manufacturing.
When a 6lowpan packet leaves the 802.15.4 network through a gateway router, that router expands the packet to a full IPv6 packet and forms addresses by adding its own 64-bit prefix.
Regarding grouping, this is something you should do at the application layer. I.e, build such a group identification into the framing you do over UDP. Another way to do that is use a common UDP port for a group of nodes.
There is theoretically multicast support in 6lowpan RFC4944 which could be used to multicast traffic to a particular group of nodes. We don't have that implemented in NanoStack right now, maybe something to work on if anyone finds it useful or interesting now.
- Zach