A lightweight stateful address autoconfiguration for 6LoWPAN

Sensor networks have become increasingly important in various areas, and most current applications require connectivity between sensor networks and the Internet. By being seamlessly integrated into IP network infrastructure, sensor network applications would benefit from standardized and established technology, as well as from the plethora of readily available applications. Preparing sensor networks for IP communication and integrating them into the IP network, however, present new challenges on the architecture and its functional blocks, e.g., the adaptation of the respective link technology for IP support, development of security mechanisms, and autoconfiguration to support ad hoc deployment. In this paper, we focus on the IPv6 address autoconfiguration issue and propose a proxy-based autoconfiguration protocol. The proposed protocol guarantees the assignment of a unique address to each node in the network. The protocol is simulated and implemented on off-the-shelf sensor network platforms. The experiment results show that our mechanism outperforms similar network address configuring mechanisms in terms of latency and overhead.