The LoRa Alliance announced that LoRaWAN now seamlessly supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) from end to end. By expanding the breadth of device-to-application solutions with IPv6, LoRaWAN’s addressable IoT market is also broadened to include internet-based standards required in smart electricity metering and new applications in smart buildings, industries, logistics, and homes.
The new IPv6 adaptation layer facilitates and accelerates the development of secure and interoperable applications over LoRaWAN and builds on the alliance’s commitment to ease of use. IP-based solutions, commonly found in enterprise and industrial solutions, among many others, can now be transmitted over LoRaWAN, and easily integrated with cloud infrastructures. This allows developers to quickly enable internet-based applications, while significantly reducing time-to-market and total cost of ownership.
The successful development of IPv6 Over LoRaWAN is credited to the active collaboration of LoRa Alliance members in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to specify the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) and fragmentation techniques, which makes transport of the IP packets over LoRaWAN very efficient. The LoRa Alliance IPv6 over LoRaWAN Task Force then took the SCHC specification (RFC 90111) and integrated it into the body of the LoRaWAN standard. LoRa Alliance member company, Acklio, made significant contributions to enabling IPv6 over LoRaWAN and was integral to the development of the SCHC technology for LoRaWAN.
The first application to leverage SCHC for IPv6 over LoRaWAN is DLMS/COSEM for smart metering. It was developed as part of the liaison between LoRa Alliance and the DLMS User Association to address electric utility requirements for the use of IP-based standards. There are many additional applications for IPv6 over LoRaWAN, such as monitoring internet networking equipment, reading RFID labels, and IP-based smart home applications, among others.
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