IPv6 communications over LoRa for future IoV services

Abstract

The advantages of all-IP scenarios are clear for both high-level protocol and application developers. However, the usage of IPv6 together with new communication technologies especially designed for Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is not straightforward. This is the case of Low Power-Wide Area Networks (LP-WAN), where packets have a restricted length and the sole IPv6 header implies an excessive load. Fortunately, the arrival of the edge computing paradigm presents a perfect frame to locate adaptation mechanisms for embedding IPv6 datagrams within these networks at the frontier between the LP-WAN and the Internet. In this line, this work presents a solution in the area of vehicular IoT, which allows the IPv6 end-to-end connectivity between a moving device and an Internet node, by means of an adaptation mechanism performed in a Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) node attached to the LP-WAN gateway. IPv6 datagrams are compressed following recent IETF guidelines to traverse a LoRa network segment in a transparent way for higher level applications. The solution has been implemented and a real test-bench has been set-up to validate the proposal and extract experimental results that reveal its suitability for traffic-efficiency and warning services in the vehicular domain.