Zigbee Alliance Aiming at IPv6 Support

The Zigbee Alliance announced that they’re forming an “Internet Solutions Initiative” to investigate ways of integrating IP networking into Zigbee. Translation: They’re forming a new IP6 group.

Looks like they’ve taken notice of the work thats going on over at 6LowPAN and Adam Dunkel’s Contiki/uIP project . Anyone thats familiar with the Zigbee spec knows that its almost a one to one correspondence with TCP/IP. The Zigbee NWK layer is analogous to the IP layer, the NWK routing protocol, AODV, is analogous to IP’s RIP or OSPF, and the Zigbee Application Framework is analogous to the TCP layer (without the TCP state machine and the weird sequence space thing). Zigbee has endpoints, TCP has ports. Zigbee has endpoint grouping, TCP has port binding. The list goes on and on.

One of the main benefits of Zigbee is that the protocol is designed for operation over wireless networks and was basically designed to fit 802.15.4. 6LowPAN on the other hand is doing double-back-handsprings-with-a-twist to get IPv6 to fit into the 802.15.4 frames.

More info here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 2:18 am and is filed under wsn-general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.