IPv6 in Low-Power Wireless Networks

With deeply embedded wireless sensors, a new tier of the Internet is emerging that will extend into the physical world. These wireless sensor nodes are expected to vastly outnumber conventional computer hosts as we see them today, but their strict resource constraints are unlike other technologies already common to the Internet. As wireless sensor network research took off, many in the field eschewed the use of IP as inadequate and in contradiction to the needs of wireless sensor networking. Since then, the field has matured and IP has evolved. In this paper, we show that the convergence of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) and low-power multihop wireless networking is possible, pragmatic, and efficient-especially in regard to the metrics that matter most for embedded applications, low memory footprint, high reliability, and low energy usage. Using real commercial deployments, we show that it is possible to simultaneously achieve an average duty cycle of <; 0.4%, average message delivery rate of > 99.9%, and average per-hop latency of <; 125 ms over 12 months in different environments.