Wireless sensor network with 6LoWPAN

Piotr Grzesik

Promotor: dr hab. inż. Dariusz Mrozek

Promotor pomocniczy: dr inż. Piotr Czekalski

Agenda

1. What is 6LoWPAN?
2. TCP/IP vs 6LoWPAN protocol stack
3. 6LoWPAN network example
4. First attempt at building a 6LoWPAN network with ESP32
5. Second attempt at building a 6LoWPAN network with CC2650 and CC2531
6. Next steps and future plans

What is 6LoWPAN?

• IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area network
• Allows sending IPv6 packets over networks based on IEEE 802.15.4, defined in RFC 4944 
• Devices that are using 6LoWPAN are usually low cost, low power and require low data transmission
• Header compression introduced in RFC 6282
• Neighbor discovery optimizations introduced in RFC 6775
• IPv6 over BLE introduced in RFC 7668

TCP/IP vs 6LoWPAN protocol stack

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235724907_The_Web_of_Things_-_Challenges_and_Enabling_Technologies

6LoWPAN network example

Source: http://www.libelium.com/wp-content/themes/libelium/images/content/products/mote-runner/diagrama_networking_mote_runner.png

First attempt

• Jetson Nano as the border router
• ESP32 as nodes
• Implementation based on 6LoWPAN over BLE
• Goal: Evaluate possibility of developing low-cost 6LoWPAN network with ESP32

Jetson Nano

• GPU: 128-core NVIDIA GPU
• CPU: Quad-core ARM A57
• Memory: 4 GB 64-bit LPDDR4
• OS: Linux

ESP32

• CPU Tensilica Xtensa LX6 // 160 or 240 MHz
• ULP co-processor
• 520 KiB SRAM
• Bluetooth v4.2 support

Second attempt

• Jetson Nano as the border router, based on https://github.com/cetic/6lbr/wiki
• CC2531 as slip radio for border router
• CC2650 as 6LoWPAN node
• Implementation uses ContikiOS
• Goal: Evaluate possibility of building a 6LoWPAN network based on listed hardware and ContikiOS

CC2531

• SoC based on 8051 uC, designed for solutions based on IEEE 802.15.4

CC2650

• Multi-standard 2.4 GHz ultra-low power wireless MCU
• Supports Bluetooth, ZigBee® and 6LoWPAN, and ZigBee RF4CE 
• 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 @ 48 MHz + separate ARM Cortex-M0
• Platform supported by Contiki OS

Contiki OS

Future plans

• More nodes - CC2650 SensorTag
• Alternative network based on nRF52
• Test solution with border router based on Raspberry PI
• Measure network behavior in different conditions
• Analytics on the edge with Jetson Nano