Potential field based routing for IPv6 over low power WPAN

Abstract

Requirements of IPv6 over Low Power WPAN (6LoWPAN) are energy conservation and low protocol complexity. Incorporating the desirable features, potential-field-based routing known as ALFA (autonomous load-balancing field-based any cast routing) achieves autonomous load-balancing and efficient path-length provisioning with little control overhead in a wireless mesh network (WMN), which is a hub-and-spoke type network similarly to 6LoWPAN. In this paper, we provide the protocol architecture of ALFA for 6LoWPAN to consider energy consumption. Distinct from the case of ALFA in a WMN, when the energy level of a sensor node declines to a threshold, the exchange of its potential information holds and its energy shortage is reported to a sink node. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.