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Abstract-Because of the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, IPv6 has become the de facto standard as the new identity for IoT devices. IoT devices also require low power consumption in order to have a long lifetime. In this research, we combine IPv6 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to build a low-power wireless local area network. Moreover, we develop a heterogeneous gateway, which can integrate BLE devices with other smart objects over either wired or wireless communications. By using Raspberry Pi 3 development boards as the BLE nodes and the gateway, on top of them we have deployed Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and MQTT-Sensor Network (MQTT-SN) application-layer protocols to transport sensor data. We expect that many intelligent IoT applications can be built over our prototype system based on IPv6/BLE.
Index Terms-6LoWPAN, Bluetooth Low Energy, Internet of Things, MQTT.
I.INTRODUCTION
ACCORDING to a report [1] by Gartner Inc., the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is predicted to reach 20 billion by 2020. With such vast amount of IoT devices, we need IPv6 addresses as the network-layer identifiers for them. Moreover, the power consumption of IoT devices must be relatively low, so they can be powered by coin cell batteries and can last a long time. Currently there are a variety of low-power wireless communication protocols for IoT, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) [2], and Wi-Fi HaLow. Among these protocols, BLE has the advantage that smartphones universally support BLE. That is, if IoT devices communicate with each other using BLE, people can also communicate with these IoT devices easily through their smartphones.
BLE has a significant difference from the classic Bluetooth that aims at achieving high-speed transmission. Instead, BLE focuses on minimizing the power consumption, and provides extremely low transaction latency. BLE-related services have gaining popularity in recent years. Regarding running applications in IoT devices, we have to consider the fact that IoT devices are mostly resource-limited. To make IoT applications viable, lightweight application-layer protocols...