On Power Consumption in IPv6 Over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN)

Energy consumption in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is one very critical factor in its operation because of being battery powered and the need to operate continuously over a long period of time. WSN nodes are generally miniaturized that make them light and mobile and non intrusive, but this leads to have a smaller space to carry bulky power sources. 6LoWPAN protocol, a version of WSN that can run IPv6 protocol, have a large address space in order to give unique addresses to individual objects connected to the Internet. The majority of these objects does not have access to permanent energy sources while they have to do sensing, pre-processing, and participate in routing process, including self-configuration without human intervention. There are many factors that influence energy consumption in WSN and 6LoWPAN in particular, a few examples being on the architecture or protocol layers. In this paper, we discuss some critical factors that influence energy consumption pattern. First, the parameters that are dependent on 6LoWPAN’s architecture, structure and relation with other network technology standards are introduced. This is followed by a discussion on the protocol layering and other algorithms that serve as the technical foundations for energy saving.