Spectrum: Lightweight Hybrid Address Autoconfiguration Protocol Based on Virtual Coordinates for 6LoWPAN

Stateless address autoconfiguration protocols allow nodes to select addresses and validate the uniqueness of a selected address by duplicate address detection (DAD). The considerable cost of DAD results from the message complexity increase in multihop network topologies, such as wireless sensor networks. This paper proposes a lightweight, hybrid address autoconfiguration protocol, called Spectrum, that deploys IPv6-compatible addresses into 6LoWPAN networks in a distributed manner. Spectrum creates the virtual coordinate system on the network and deploys addresses based on the location of the nodes. The deployment policy based on the virtual locations of the nodes reduces the DAD cost in the initial configuration as well as the cost for additional configurations of newly arrived nodes. The authors implemented and tested the proposed scheme in a real environment. Simulations and experiments confirmed a reasonable message cost for both stateful and stateless autoconfigurations.