LoRaWan seamlessly supports IPv6

  • May 18, 2022
  • Steve Rogerson

The LoRa Alliance has announced that LoRaWan now seamlessly supports IPv6 from end to end. An IPv6 adaptation layer facilitates and accelerates the development of secure and interoperable applications.

By expanding the breadth of device-to-application offerings with IPv6, LoRaWan’s addressable IoT market is also broadened to include internet-based standards required in smart electricity metering and applications in smart buildings, industries, logistics and homes.

The IPv6 adaptation layer facilitates and accelerates development of secure and interoperable applications over LoRaWan and builds on the alliance’s commitment to ease of use. IP-based offerings, commonly found in enterprise and industry, among many others, can now be transmitted over LoRaWan and easily integrated with cloud infrastructures. This should allow developers to quickly enable internet-based applications, while reducing time to market and total cost of ownership.

“As digitisation across market sectors continues, integrating multiple technologies to achieve end-to-end solutions is critical,” said Donna Moore, CEO of the LoRa Alliance. “At the same time, companies are requiring solutions that provide increased interoperability and adhere to standards. Now that LoRaWan readily integrates with any IP application, end users have both. IPv6 is a core technology underpinning IoT, so enabling IPv6 over LoRaWan opens a huge number of new markets and a much larger addressable application space to LoRaWan.”

She said that developers and end users with IPv6 devices recognised the benefits of digital transformation and IoT, and had already created products and services that could improve lives and the environment, as well as drive new revenue streams.

“By supporting IPv6, they now have a simple path to use LoRaWan and benefit from the technology’s proven advantages,” she said. “With this development, LoRaWan once again positions itself a market leader at the forefront of IoT.”

The successful development of IPv6 over LoRaWan is credited to the 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 task force took the SCHC specification (RFC 90111) and integrated it into the body of the LoRaWan standard. LoRa Alliance member company Acklio made contributions to enable IPv6 over LoRaWan and was integral to the development of the SCHC technology for LoRaWan.

“Acklio, a pioneer of SCHC technology, is proud to contribute to this new milestone that makes LoRaWan natively compatible with internet technologies,” said Alexander Pelov, CEO of Acklio. “The LoRa Alliance ecosystem has mobilised for the specification and adoption of this key feature in record time. SCHC solutions that are compliant with this new specification are now commercially available from partners across the IoT value chain to deploy IPv6 over LoRaWan worldwide.”

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 utilities requirement 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.