The adaptation layer is always used when sending the data over PHY and MAC layers. For example, how an IPv6 packet is encapsulated in an Ethernet frame is defined by RFC2464. It is also the same for IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi. RFC 6282 defines how an IPv6 data frame is encapsulated over an IEE 802.15.4 radio link.
IETF working group focused on 6LoWPAN WG to optimize the transmission of IPv6 packets over low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) such as IEEE 802.15.4 and led to the publication of RFC 6282 Specifying ;
Header compression
-Assuming the usage of common fields, the header compression compresses the 40-byte and 8-byte UDP headers. Header fields are suppressed when they can be derived from the link layer and the way that the header can be compressed is one of the factors that led to the standard that only supporting IPv6 and not IPv4.
Fragmentation and reassembly
-The MTU of IPv6 which is 1280 bytes does not match with the data link on IEEE 802.15.4 with a frame length of a maximum of 127 bytes. The frame format of IEEE 802.15.4g does not have the same limitation
Stateless autoconfiguration
-It is the process where the devices in the 6LoWPAN network automatically generate their own IPv6 address. A method to avoid the two devices getting the same address is called duplicate address detection (DAD)
The key concept of the 6LoWPAN adaptation layer is to use stateless or shared-context compression to compressed header fields. This can compress all headers (adaptation, network, and transport layers) down to a few bytes. Header fields are possible to compress since they often carry common values. Common values always occur due to frequent use of a subset of IPv6 functionality, namely UDP, TCP, and ICMP. The 6LoWPAN adaptation layer removes duplicate information that can be derived from other layers such as the IPv6 addresses and UDP/IPv6 length fields.
As you can see from the above technical explanation, you will notice 6LoWPAN exists and does provide a much more practical approach to local personal area network (PAN) device exchange of data, in particular for the model world where Internet of Things (IoT) devices keep rising. We are now in the world full of IoT sensors, whether it is your smartphone you wear all the time, to smartTag you bind with your physical keys, to smart home or smart office devices, all are IoT devices.
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