Affiliations: Department of Information and Communication
Engineering, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
Note: [] Corresponding author: Antonio J. Jara, Department of Information
and Communication Engineering, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain. Tel.: +34
868888771; Fax: +34 868884151; E-mail: jara@um.es
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) requires scalability, extensibility and
a transparent integration of multi-technology in order to reach an efficient
support for global communications, discovery and look-up, as well as access to
services and information. To achieve these goals, it is necessary to enable a
homogenous and seamless machine-to-machine (M2M) communication mechanism
allowing global access to devices, sensors and smart objects. In this respect,
the proposed answer to these technological requirements is called Glowbal IP,
which is based on a homogeneous access to the devices/sensors offered by the
IPv6 addressing and core network. Glowbal IP's main advantages with regard to
6LoWPAN/IPv6 are not only that it presents a low overhead to reach a higher
performance on a regular basis, but also that it determines the session and
identifies global access by means of a session layer defined over the
application layer. Technologies without any native support for IP are thereby
adaptable to IP e.g. IEEE 802.15.4 and Bluetooth Low Energy. This extension
towards the IPv6 network opens access to the features and methods of the
devices through a homogenous access based on WebServices (e.g. RESTFul/CoAP).
In addition to this, Glowbal IP offers global interoperability among the
different devices, and interoperability with external servers and users
applications. All in all, it allows the storage of information related to the
devices in the network through the extension of the Domain Name System (DNS)
from the IPv6 core network, by adding the Service Directory extension (DNS-SD)
to store information about the sensors, their properties and functionality. A
step forward in network-based information systems is thereby reached, allowing
a homogenous discovery, and access to the devices from the IoT. Thus, the IoT
capabilities are exploited by allowing an easier and more transparent
integration of the end users applications with sensors for the future
evaluations and use cases.
Keywords: Internet of Things, machine to machine, 6LoWPAN, address management, global communications, end-to-end addressability
