A gateway solution for IPv6 wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are expected to be deployed widely in various areas in coming years. The sensor device is small and has low computation power and memory thus perceived as not suitable to be loaded with the high resource IP capabilities. Due to this, the wireless sensor network remains isolated from the Internet. The emergence of IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) has proved that IP communication is borderless and can be used for any devices. It provides a simple alternative to other wireless sensor networks and interoperable with IP-legacy systems and tools. However, the use of short addresses within the 6LoWPAN network is not visible to the outside world and hence a proper gateway is required. In this paper, we provide the architecture of the 6LoWPAN gateway which connects the wireless sensor world to the Internet. Our contribution is to provide direct accessibility to wireless sensor network using short address to full IPv6 address translation at the gateway. Our main focus is the flow of packets to and from the gateway including a simple address translation mechanism. The implementation and the use cases of the gateway are also highlighted.