Routing in 6LoWPAN

Internet Protocol Version 6 over Low‐Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) aims at extreme network scalability and providing IP‐based connectivity even to the smallest of sensors and actuators that have a requirement to communicate among each other or with the external world over the Internet. The communication with the smart objects can be unidirectional, as in case of radio‐frequency Identification (RFID) tags, or bidirectional, as in the case of sensors communicating using Bluetooth, ZigBee, or 6LoWPAN. This chapter discusses some of the applications of 6LoWPAN. 6LoWPAN has attractive features of autoconfiguration, IPv6 fragmentation, mesh forwarding, mobility support, and up to 80% header compression. 6LoWPAN uses a ‘route over’ approach by IP routing during routing at the IP layer and a ‘mesh under’ approach by multihop communication using the media access control (MAC) address during routing below the link layer.