Internet of Things (IoT): IPv6 Implementation for
Smart Vision of the World
Aditya Bhardwaj1, Pawan Kumar2, Amit Doegar. 3
Department of Computer Science & Engineering , NITTTR Chandigarh-160019, INDIA.
[email protected] , [email protected] , [email protected]
A B S T R A C T
Recently, the concept of the Internet as a set of connected desktop computer devices is changed to a set of connected surrounding things of human’s living space, such as machines, transportation, and home appliances etc. The number of objects in the human’s living space is larger than the existing world population. Research is going on how to make these things to communicate with each other. By enabling new era of communication between people and things, and between things themselves, IoT would add a new dimension of opportunities to the world of information and communication technology just as Internet once did. To make the vision of Iot successful IPv4 addressing mechanism is not enough so there is need to shift to a new Internet Protocol addressing mechanism called IPv6 Addressing. The main contribution of this paper is that it implements the IPv6 addressing which is the demand for addressing uniquely each machine on the Internet in IoT network.
Index Terms: Internet of Things (IoT) , IPv6, IPv4, RFID, Machine to Machine Communication, WSN Network.
I. INTRODUCTION
Internet has become more prevalent in our lives in a shorter time period than any other technology in the history. The next revolution in the era of computing will be outside the realm of traditional desktop computing. Smart devices, Smart cars, Smart homes, Smart phones and Smart cities achieving these goals have been investigated by many research communities. The number of things in living space is larger than the world population. Research is going on how to make these things to communicate with each other. This vision of smart world can be achieved through the concept known as Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is an intelligent network which connects smart objects such as machines, transportation, home appliances, and business storage etc, to the Internet for the purpose of exchange of information and communication through the information sensing devices in accordance with agreed protocols. Using sensors and RF identification, smart objects are able to perceive their context, and via built in networking capabilities they would be able to communicate each other. Market surveyed has predicted that by 2020, more than 50 billion smart devices will be deployed and connected to the Internet, serving people anytime and anywhere [1].
There are many application domains like transportation, healthcare, industrial automation, smart cities, and education etc in which IoT technology can provide useful services. Since, IoT depends upon the ability to uniquely identify internet-connected objects; the addressable space must be large enough to accommodate the uniquely assigned IP addresses to the different devices. The original internet protocol IPv4 uses 32 bit address, which allows only for 4.3 billion unique IP addresses, so the available
IP-addresses are in short supply [2]. Fortunately, the new IPv6 IP addressing mechanism has 128 bit address, which has an address space of 2128=340 billion billion billion billion unique IP addresses, which
is likely to solve the addressability bottleneck problem being faced by the Internet of Things (IoT)[3]. IPv6 is having many advantages over IPv4 addressing mechanism such as configuration of network becomes much simpler because there is no need of NAT (Network Address Translation) mechanism for the translation of private to public address and vice versa. Various features such as Multicast, Anycast, Mobility Support, Auto-Configuration, IPSec have been built into the IPv6 addressing mechanism that is very useful both for the operation and the deployment of IoT.
This paper is organized as follows. In section II overview of IoT is presented. In section III and IV IoT Framework and Technologies used in IoT is presented. In section V IPv6 addressing mechanism for IoT is presented. Implementation of IPv6 is presented in section VI . Finally concluding remark and future work is stated in section VII.
II. OVERVIEW OF IoT
It is projected that , by 2020, there will be around 50 billion objects connected to the Internet of Things making the IoT one of the fastest –growing technology across all of the computing[4]. These smart objects will alter the way we interact with our physical environment, thereby revolutionizing a number of application domain such as healthcare, home automation, energy conservation, smart cities etc.
A) Definition
“Internet of Things (IoT) is world of information and communication technologies from anytime, anyplace, anything connectivity for anyone.” IoT provides common environment where objects or things will be able to communicate with each other using standardized communication platform [1]. In simple terms IoT means a network of physical objects that can interact with each other to share information and take action i.e IoT is an environment where machine talks to machines.
The objective of IoT is that objects of everyday life such as refrigerators, cars, roadways or even cattle can be equipped with sensors, and can sense the environment and communicate, so that they become tools for understanding complexity, and may enable automatic response to challenging scenarios without human intervention. In simple terms the ultimate goal of IoT is to create a better world for human beings, where objects around us know what we like, what we want, what we need and act accordingly without explicit instruction.
B) Applications of IoT
There are several application domains which will be impacted by the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). Potential IoT applications identified by the different focus groups are given below:
a) IoT in Smart Home: In today’s world, smart homes are becoming more and more cost effective and
intellectualized with continuous progress in information and communication technology, which connects the Internet with daily use devices for connecting virtual and physical objects though the data capture and communication capabilities development.
b) Traffic Information System:. This application get traffic information such as road traffic situations
and congested routes by tracking the location information of a large number of vehicles then the system assists the driver to choose the most efficient route.
c) Location Sensing: The IoT system can collect the geographical position information of objects , and
then provide services based on the collected location information.
d) Environment Sensing: The IoT system collects and process environmental parameters such as
humidity, temperature, pollution, light intensity, visibility and noise. Now, using environmental parameters collected by large number of sensors, IoT can detect glacier, disaster, and earthquake etc using automatic alarm systems.
e) Energy and Utilities Sectors: Smart electricity and water transmission grids, real-time monitoring
of sewage systems, efficient energy.
C).Research Challenges in IoT
In the IoT technology, hundreds of billions of devices will communicate with each other without human intervention, on a Machine-to-Machine (M2M) basis. There are still many research challenges for industrial use such as security and privacy, technology, and standardization. Future efforts are required to address these challenges and examine the characteristics of different industries to ensure a good fit of IoT technology in the industrial environments. A sufficient understanding of factors such as security, privacy, cost, and risk is required before IoT will be widely accepted and deployed in real world environment. There are following challenged in Internet of Things (IoT) that need to be addresses:
a) Interoperability and Scalability: Since each object is likely to have different information,
processing and communication capabilities, different objects would be subjected to different conditions such as the energy available and the communication bandwidth required. So, to facilitate communication and cooperation, common practices and standards are required.
b) Common Standardization and Integration: The rapid growth of IoT makes the standardization
difficult. A careful standardization process and a lot of coordination efforts are needed to ensure devices and applications from different countries to be able to exchange information.
c) Technical Challenges: There are technical challenges such as design of service-oriented architecture,
and developing networking technologies and standards that can allow data gathered by a large number of devices to move efficiently within IoT networks [6].
d) Security and Privacy Protection : The acceptance of new IoT technology will rely on the information
security and data privacy protection. To secure the information exchange in the IoT existing encryption technology need to be carefully reviewed.
e) Automatic Configuration of Sensors: There has to be an automated or at least semi-automated
process to connect sensors to the applications.
Figure 2: Applications of IoT [6]
III. IoT FRAMEWORK
IoT architecture consists of four main different types of layers: Sensing, Networking, Service and Interface Layer:
Layers Description
Sensing Layer • This layer gathers data/information and identifies the physical world. Hardware such as sensors, RFID, actuators etc are used to sense/control the physical world and acquire data.
Networking Layer • Also called as Wireless Sensor Networks. The role of networking layer is to allow objects to share the information with other connected objects.
• This layer is also responsible for providing support and data transfer over Service Layer • This layer creates and manages services. It provide services to satisfy user needs Interface Layer • This layer is responsible for providing interaction methods to users and other
applications.
TableI: IoT Framework Elements[1]
Figure3: IoT Framework [7]
IV. TECHNOLOGIES USED IN IoT
The automatic exchange of information between two devices without any manual input is the main objective of the Internet of Things (IoT). This automatic information exchange between two devices takes place through following communication technologies described below:
a) Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN): The WSN network consists of WSN hardware, WSN
communication stack, and WSN middleware. WSN hardware allows sensor interfaces, processing units, and power supply. WSN stack is responsible for communication amongst nodes. WSN middleware is responsible for developing sensor application independent of the platform[13]. b) RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)[8]: It is used for automatic identification of any device
it is attached to acting as an electronic bar code.
c) Addressing schemes: The IoT provide an incredibly high number of devices that need to be
retrieve by any authorized user regardless of his/her position. This require effective addressing scheme. Currently IPv4 protocol identifies each device through 32 bit address, but it is well known that number of IPv4 addresses is decreasing rapidly and will soon reach zero. Therefore, new addressing scheme is to be used for addressing large number of objects in IoT system [15].
To overcome this problem of small address space in IPv4, IPv6 addressing has been proposed which has 128 bit address and 2128 address space which is large enough to identify any device uniquely in the IoT
system.
V. ADDRESSING MECHANISM IN IPv6
The number of Internet-connected users, applications and smart devices are growing at such a rapid pace that the pool of available addresses for the original version of the Internet Protocol, known as IPv4, is being rapidly depleted. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support for approximate 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet [13]. The new generation protocol of Internet communication, called IPv6, uses 128-bit addresses and provides such a vast number of addresses that it can be expressed mathematically: 3.4*1038. Most Internet policymakers and network technology experts assert that the
now shift to IPv6 addressing mechanism is a need for the future internet communication.
Features Ipv4 IPv6
IP Address Size 32 bit 128 bit Example IP Address 192.168.10.10 2001:db8:10:22::1
Total Number of IP Addresses[10] 232=4,294,967,296 possible
addresses
2128approax 4*1038 Internet IP
Addresses
Loopback Address 127.0.0.1 ::1
Network Address Translation Required[9]
Yes No
MAC Discovery ARP Protocol Neighbor Discovery protocol
IPSec Support optional mandatory Table II. Comparision between IPv4 and IPv6[13]
VI. IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY FOR IPv6
The growth of internet based applications such as Cloud Computing, Smart Grid, Social Networking sites, and IoT etc drive the need for a new version of the Internet Protocol. Current Internet Protocol i.e IPv4 address space of 232 IP addresses is almost completed now-a-days, but in the future the number of
devices connected to the internet is going to go up at a greater rate. This rases the demand for more IP addresses. To overcome this shortage of IP addresses problem, it is suggested to move from Internet Protocol version 4 to Internet Protocol version 6. To meet the future demand of IP addressing there is need to have IPv6 implementation on the system. Our implementation test cases are done by two systems setup “server.com” & “client.com”. Link Local IPv6 address at server.com is “fe80::20c:29ff:fe35:aaee”. Similarly Link Local IPv6 address at client.com is “fe80::20c:29ff:fe37:400e”.
Snapshot1: Client to Server connectivity test
Now the main networking files of both systems are configured for setting up the network parameters , some of the configured files snapshots are:
Snapshot2: Server network configuration
All these experiments are conducted on the Redhat 6.3 Server version of the Linux distribution. For the proper configuration of both server and client machines we need to check the connectivity between the machines and then assignment of static global public IP Addresses. On the booting time both machines should be assigned static configured Global public IP addresses as follows:
Snapshot3: Server networking file
Now we need to start the network and stop the firewall then the Public IPv6 configured on the server machine will be as shown in snapshot4:
Snapshot4: Client to Server network connectivity
In Snapshot4, Global Public IPv6 address 2001::31 configured on client machine shows the Global Link Local Address which can be used for communicating the devices over the Internet. Similarly in Snapshot5 shows the Server to Client network connectivity for the Global Link Local IPv6 addresses 2001::11
Snapshot5: Server to Client Network Connectivity
VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE
Today’s modern Internet has changed the way we live. The IoT add a new dimension by enabling communication with and among smart objects, thus leading to vision of “anytime, anywhere, anything and anyone communication”. But for communication on the Internet each device requires its own Public IP address. Currently IP addressing mechanism i.e IPv4 is almost completed, so the challenges arises that how to add new things and enable new services on the Internet. Without public IP addresses, the Internet of Things concept would not work. To overcome this challenge of limited address space in IPv4 next generation of Internet Protocol Addressing mechanism has been introduce known as IPv6. Ipv6 provides features such as Mobile IPv6, IP Security (IPSec) for security, large address space, and auto-configuration that are needed for the implementation of IoT. So to meet the demand of IPv6 for the ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things (IoT) computing there is need to integrate IPv6 addressing mechanism in full support. In this paper, we configured and implemented the IPv6 by using two systems: client and server as shown above in the snapshots. In future, research on the IoTs with the challenges as standardization protocols, sensors technology, cloud computing technology integration with IoT, Energy aware communication protocol, interoperability of devices will remain a hot issue for research-work.
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10 | © 2015, IJAFRSE and ICCICT 2015 All Rights Reserved
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