A Review of 6LoWPAN Routing Protocols

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group has standardized the transmission of internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) packets over IEEE 802.15.4 low power wireless personal area network (LoWPAN) as 6LoWPAN protocol. It provides the wireless sensor network (WSN) node with IP communication capabilities by putting an adaptation layer above the 802.15.4 link layer. Different mechanisms performed by adaptation layer require the 6LoWPAN header encapsulation in the packet. Although routing is among the key issues of 6LoWPAN research, the way to encapsulate a new routing header in the 6LoWPAN packet has yet been investigated thoroughly. In this paper, different ways of routing header encapsulation in 6LoWPAN protocol stack is discussed. The simplified version Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) such as On-Demand Distance Vector (LOAD) and Dynamic MANET On-demand for 6LoWPAN (DYMO-low) have currently been proposed in 6LoWPAN routing. Hierarchical routing (HiLow) is another routing protocol that is used in 6LoWPAN to increase the network scalability. Some comparisons of these routing protocols have been made in terms of their routing metric such as number of hops count. The used control messages for the route discovery in different routing protocols have also been investigated. These comparisons show that each routing protocol has its own advantage depends on the involved applications. There are some tradeoffs of respective routing protocols. The routing protocol that uses hello message may provide more reliable but results a higher delay in the packet routing.