A Comparative Study on Available IPv6 Platforms for Wireless Sensor Network Usman Sarwar, Gopinath Sinniah Rao, Zeldi Suryady, and Reza Khoshdelniat Abstract—The low power wireless sensor devices which usually uses the low power wireless private area network (IEEE 802.15.4) standard are being widely deployed for various purposes and in different scenarios. IPv6 low power wireless private area network (6LoWPAN) was adopted as part of the IETF standard for the wireless sensor devices so that it will become an open standard compares to other dominated proprietary standards available in the market. 6LoWPAN also allows the integration and communication of sensor nodes with the Internet more viable. This paper presents a comparative study on different available IPv6 platforms for wireless sensor networks including open and close sources. It also discusses about the platforms used by these stacks. Finally it evaluates and provides appropriate suggestions which can be use for selection of required IPv6 stack for low power devices. Keywords—6LoWPAN Stacks, 6LoWPAN Platforms, m-Stack, NanoStack, uIPv6, PhyNet 6LoWPAN, Jennic 6LoWPAN. I. INTRODUCTION URRENT trends have directed the usage of wireless sensor network for various purposes. The applications of using this technology are endless from agriculture to health monitoring to military purposes. The low power wireless sensor devices which usually uses the low power wireless private area network (IEEE 802.15.4) standard are being widely deployed for various purposes and in different scenarios. The biggest challenges in the deployment of these sensor devices, also called as motes, are to efficiently use the low power and low bandwidth. IPv6 makes communication to become more visible across various networks and various devices. IPv6 low power wireless private area network (6LoWPAN) was adopted as part of the IETF standard for the sensor devices so that it will become an open standard compares to other dominated proprietary standards available in the market. 6LoWPAN is not restricted to IEEE 802.15.4 standard rather can use other layer two standards as well. The deployment of IP base wireless sensor network is a next step to integrate this technology with the Internet devices for global connectivity and provides end to end communications. II. DISCUSSION This section now discusses about following available IPv6 platforms for wireless sensor network: Authors are with MIMOS Bhd, Malaysia (e-mails: {usman.sarwar,gopinath.rao,zeldi.suryady,reza.khoshdelniat}@mimos.my). A. uIPv6 uIPv6 is a next version of uIP which was an implementation of IPv4 on WSN. uIPv6 is the smallest certified IPv6 stack for low power and low processing tiny devices reminiscent of actuator and sensor nodes. It is an open source and licensed under BSD license that allows it to be used in both open and closed source projects. uIPv6 is one of the smallest IPv6 stack available which has ROM size of 11.5 Kbytes and RAM size of 1.8 Kbytes. It can be use with resource constrained platforms due to lesser requirements. uIPv6 stack is built on top of Contiki operating system [5] but due to its modular design can also be use with other operating systems. Total memory utilization in conjunction with Contiki requires to have 35KB of ROM and 3KB of RAM. Contiki with uIPv6 runs on Atmel Raven, Tmote Sky/TelosB, and number of other AVR-based and MSP430-based platforms. It is also tied up with UDP and TCP protocol implementations [2]. Fig. 1 demonstrates uIPv6 over layer two protocols. Fig. 1 uIPv6 over different L2 protocols [2] The uIPv6 stack implemented all the musts of RFC4294 IPv6 node requirements except for multicast listener discovery support and redirect function support [7]. It implements header compression, fragmentation and addressing as defined in RFC4944 [7]. As it conforms to IETF 6LoWPAN specification, it can be interoperable with Arch Rock and Sensinode 6LoWPAN implementations. uIPv6 implements route over technique as compare to mesh under-related features. It has also employed the new 6LoWPAN header compression scheme [8]. It uses a single global buffer for incoming and outgoing packets. The length of the buffer is the length of the MAC header in addition to 1280 bytes (i.e., the minimum link MTU). Additional buffers are available to support fragmentation reassembly and per neighbor packet buffering. The main data structures are the interface address C World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering Vol:4, No:2, 2010 352 International Scholarly and Scientific Research & Innovation 4(2) 2010 scholar.waset.org/1307-6892/14671 International Science Index, Electronics and Communication Engineering Vol:4, No:2, 2010 waset.org/Publication/14671