Performance Analysis of IP over IEEE 802.15.4 Radio using 6LoWPAN

IEEE 802.15.4 is the standard wireless link technology for low power, low cost, low data-rate, but long lifetime applications including wireless sensor network (WSN). Currently, whether or not IP architecture should be used in WSN over its 802.15.4 link is under dispute. One view is that IP architecture is not suitable for WSN; instead ad hoc network architecture is more preferred to be designed specifically for it. In contrast, IP architecture is seen more as an opportunity for WSNs, even some extra overhead is tolerable taking into consideration the benefits it will bring; and it is also argued that such overheads may actually be minimized through optimization. Such kind of arguments may last for a long time without some convincing experimental measurements of real case performances of IP over 802.15.4 implementation, and thus prevent the advance of related research. In RFC4944, IETF proposed the 6LoWPAN specification to enable IPv6 communication over low power, wireless personal area networks. Since then, we see a great demand and value of making an evaluation of this specification. In this paper, we carry out a performance evaluation of 6LoWPAN on the memory footprint, network capability, transmission delay, and routing cost using a Berkeley 6LoWPAN implementation, b6LoWPAN, on Tmote Sky running TinyOS 2.1. We try to alleviate the dispute and make the direction clearer to the community so as to promote further valuable research in this topic.