Prototype Implementation of IPv6 Bluetooth Low Energy Mesh Network

• Main Authors: Chao-Kang Cheng, 鄭朝剛
• Other Authors: 林其誼
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/pfxbz9

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 資訊工程學系碩士班 === 106 === The rapid development of IoT technologies has fostered many intelligent services such as Industry 4.0, smart healthcare, and smart home. The operations of these intelligent services rely on the underlying low-power link-layer technologies because IoT devices are expected to run for a long time. If IoT devices run out of power quickly, the intelligent services also stop running. Nowadays the popular low-power wireless link-layer technologies are ZigBee and Bluetooth. Moreover, IoT devices need to be identified by an address. Since the IPv4 address has been depleted, the IPv6 address will be used to identify the IoT devices. Although the ZigBee technology has been quite popular in constructing IoT environments, users are unable to interact with the ZigBee-based IoT devices using their smartphones. By contrast, smartphones are universally equipped with the Bluetooth interface, so building IoT environments using the Bluetooth technology has been gaining significant attention in recent years. IETF RFC7668, proposed in late 2015, specifies the standard of IPv6 over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). However, it can only support the star topology. In July 2017, the Bluetooth SIG published the first official mesh specification. With the latest Bluetooth 5.0 technology that supports longer range and faster transmission rate, we believe that Bluetooth has the potential of being a major player in IoT infrastructure. Nevertheless, the specification of IPv6 over BLE mesh network is yet to be standardized in order to make IoT devices accessible through the Internet. Therefore, in this thesis we try to build a prototype of IPv6 over BLE mesh network using Bluetooth development boards that support the official mesh protocol. Specifically, a node plays the role of a 6LoWPAN Border Router (6LBR) to distribute an IPv6 prefix to other nodes in the Bluetooth mesh network. In the experimental mesh network, a node playing the role of a 6LoWPAN Router (6LR) is responsible for relaying the IPv6 prefix to other 6LoWPAN Nodes (6LNs). When either 6LR or 6LN receives the IPv6 prefix, they will automatically generate a global IPv6 address based on their own MAC address. Note that the current mesh specification does not support the IP protocol stack, so in our prototype the operation of IP address generation is implemented at the application layer.