6TiSCH, IPv6 over G.9959, and Bluetooth Low Energy Networks
6TiSCH: IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4e
The IETF IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE802.15.4e (6TiSCH) working group has standardized a set of protocols to enable low power industrial-grade IPv6 networks. 6TiSCH proposes a protocol stack rooted in the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of the IEEE802.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has standardized a set of protocols to respond to the increasing demand for IP-enabled constrained devices. Several working groups have been created to design and develop standard specifications for devices to empower the IoT. These groups have targeted the integration of different link layer technologies to the Internet Protocol (IP) ecosystem, dealing with major limitations imposed by the underlying technologies in terms of payload size, memory footprint, computing capacity and non-trivial topologies, while ensuring IP-compliance. The IETF IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE802.15.4e (6TiSCH) Working Group (WG) was created to work on the standardization of the control plane and the IP layer adaptation on top of the IEEE802.15.4 TSCH link layer. 6TiSCH has been one of the main efforts to bring IPv6 to industrial low-power wireless, bridging Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) networks with 6LoWPAN networks. This pioneering work has identified and addressed the many remaining challenges when building IPv6 on low-capacity networks. It has become a glue for the different layers, and has triggered improvements in header compression, IP-in-IP encapsulation, and 6LoWPAN Neighbour Discovery, providing more capable routing schemes and security management consistently aiming at more efficiency and simplicity.
IPv6 over G.9959 Networks
RFC 7428 defines the frame format for transmitting IPv6 packets on ITU-T G.9959 networks. G.9959 defines a unique 32-bit home network identifier that is assigned by the controller and an 8-bit host identifier that is allocated for each node. An IPv6 link local address must be constructed by the link layer derived 8-bit host identifier so that it can be compressed in a G.9959 frame. Furthermore, the same header compression as in 6LoWPAN is used here to fit an IPv6 packet into G.9959 frames. RFC 7428 also provides a level of security by a shared network key that is used for encryption. However, applications with a higher level of security requirements need to handle their end-to-end encryption and authentication using their own higher layer security mechanisms [6Lo].
IPv6 over Bluetooth Low Energy
Bluetooth Low Energy is also known as Bluetooth Smart and was introduced in Bluetooth V4.0 and enhanced in V4.1. RFC 7668 [RFC7668], which specifies IPv6 over Bluetooth LE, reuses most of the 6LoWPAN compression techniques. However, since the Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP) sublayer in Bluetooth already provides segmentation and reassembly of larger payloads into 27-byte L2CAP packets, fragmentation features from 6LoWPAN standards are not used. Another significant difference is that Bluetooth Low Energy does not currently support the formation of multi-hop networks at the link layer. Instead, a central node acts as a router between lower-powered peripheral nodes.