Design Considerations for Low Power Internet Protocols

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the challenges of designing low-power IPv6 protocols like 6LoWPAN, highlighting the tradeoffs between code size and energy efficiency, and proposes principles to improve protocol flexibility and interoperability.

Contribution

It identifies design tradeoffs causing communication failures in low-power IPv6 stacks and introduces three principles to enhance protocol flexibility for low-power networks.

Findings

Different low-power IPv6 stacks cannot communicate due to design tradeoffs.

Applying traditional protocol principles leads to failures in low-power contexts.

Proposed design principles enable flexible tradeoffs and seamless communication.

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, low-power wireless networks have transitioned to supporting IPv6 connectivity through 6LoWPAN, a set of standards which specify how to aggressively compress IPv6 packets over low-power wireless links such as 802.15.4. We find that different low-power IPv6 stacks are unable to communicate using 6LoWPAN, and therefore IP, due to design tradeoffs between code size and energy efficiency. We argue that applying traditional protocol design principles to low-power networks is responsible for these failures, in part because receivers must accommodate a wide range of senders. Based on these findings, we propose three design principles for Internet protocols on low-power networks. These principles are based around the importance of providing flexible tradeoffs between code size and energy efficiency. We apply these principles to 6LoWPAN and show that the resulting design of the protocol provides developers a wide range of tradeoff points while allowing implementations with different choices to seamlessly communicate.