6LoWPAN Over Optical Wireless Communications for IPv6 Transport in Internet of Things Networks

As an emerging technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) wireless connectivity, there have been a lot of research and standardization activities on Visible Light Communications (VLC) and Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) using Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights. In the meantime, the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) has been discussed to provide the IPv6-based IoT services in wireless networks. However, the study on IoT systems using 6LoWPAN over OWC networks has not been made so far. This letter proposes a new architectural model to effectively use 6LoWPAN between IoT gateway and IoT device in the OWC-based IoT networks. The proposed model is easy to implement and provides the performance enhancement in OWC-based IoT networks, compared to the general IPv6 model. From testbed experimentations, it is shown that the proposed model provides the delay gain up to 5% and the throughput gain up to 19.52%, compared to the conventional IPv6 transport model.