A Variable Length Address Assignment Scheme for 6LoWPAN

Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) are an enabling technology for many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. To allow LLNs to interoperate with the Internet, an address autoconfiguration protocol must be used to assign network addresses. However, the potentially vast number of IoT devices puts a massive strain on IP addressing. In this paper, we present a variable-length address allocating scheme for 6LoWPAN. Our analysis and evaluation results show that the proposed variable-length addresses could guarantee the scalability property of hierarchical addressing, and alleviate the inefficiency of address space due to fixed-length addresses.