A 6LoWPAN accelerator for Internet of things endpoint devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the Internet of the future and the way smart devices, people and processes interact with each other. Challenges in endpoint devices communication are due not only to the security and privacy-related requirements but also due to the ever-growing amount of data transferred over the network that needs to be handled, which can considerably reduce the system availability to perform other tasks. This article presents a 6LoWPAN accelerator for the IP-based IoT networks, which is able to process and filter IPv6 packets received by an IEEE 802.15.4 radio transceiver without interrupting the microcontroller. It offers nearly 13.24% of performance overhead reduction for the packet processing and the address filtering tasks, while guaranteeing full system availability when unwanted packets are received and discarded. The contribution is meant to be deployed on heterogeneous endpoint devices at the network edge, which include on the same architecture, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology beside a microcontroller and an IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio transceiver. Performed evaluations include the low FPGA hardware resources utilization and the energy consumption analysis when the processing and accepting/rejection of a received packet is performed by the 6LoWPAN accelerator.This work was supported in part by the COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and in part by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia under Grant UID/CEC/00319/2013. The work of T. Gomes was supported by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia under Grant SFRH/BD/90162/2012.