Energy consumption of 6LoWPAN and Zigbee in home automation networks

Current home networks are often split up in high data rate networks for multimedia and internet applications and low data rate networks for home automation. This separation leads to inefficient and cumbersome network configurations. It also hinders the widespread use of home automation networks. The IPv6 adaptation for resource constrained devices can help to realize a common addressing scheme for the complete home network. Often the overhead of IPv6 is considered as a drawback for its utilization in home automation networks with low data rates. In this paper, the overhead and the energy consumption of 6LoWPAN in an exemplary home network is calculated and compared with Zigbee. Assuming efficient configurations of both protocol stacks only small differences can be observed. Additionally, the energy consumption of both 6LoWPAN and Zigbee reference implementations on the same hardware is evaluated. Both protocols have comparable energy consumption. For an energy efficient home automation network an intelligent network configuration with only a small number of routers is most important.