Talk: "State and Future of generic 6LoWPAN branch" (Alexander Aring)

6LoWPAN stands for IPv6 over Low-Rate Wireless Area Network and was original specified for 802.15.4 wireless networks. The IEEE 802.15.4 wireless standard is such Low-Rate WPAN standard. The 6LoWPAN stack provides an adaptation layer to run IPv6 on top of a specific link-layer like 802.15.4.

Nowadays 6LoWPAN isn't only an acronym for running IPv6 on top of WPANs anymore. There are several upcoming RFCs to run 6LoWPAN on various link-layers like NFC, Powerline, DECT, etc. The most link-layer 6LoWPAN RFCs for each new link-layer adaptation refers to the first original RFCs which is the 802.15.4 6LoWPAN specification. The reason behind that is to keeping same mechanism with slightly link-layer specific changes. The generic 6LoWPAN branch offers these mechanism which are specified by more than one link-layer 6LoWPAN specifications.

Planned Agenda:

This talk will start with the current state of generic 6LoWPAN and how link-layers subsystems use it. After that the talk will show the future plans for the 6LoWPAN generic branch which contains a simple 6LoWPAN netdevice registration framework and offering a unify userspace abstraction. Also it will point out issues by doing 6LoWPAN adaptation to the Linux IPv6 stack.