BLEach: a fully open-source IPv6-over-BLE stack for Constrained Embedded IoT Devices

Overview

In 2015, the IETF released the RFC 7668 that specifies how IPv6 packets can be exchanged using BLE connections (IPv6 over BLE). This Contiki extenstion implements BLEach, a fully open-source IPv6-over-BLE stack for Contiki. BLEach in Contiki-NG can be used for node (BLE slave) devices.

It was developed by

Michael Spoerk, Graz University of Technology, michael.spoerk@tugraz.at, github user: spoerk

This IPv6-over-BLE stack is presented and evaluated in the paper: BLEach: Exploiting the Full Potential of IPv6 over BLE in Constrained Embedded IoT Devices, ACM SenSys'17.

Features

This implementation includes:

IPv6-over-BLE node implementation compliant to RFC 7668
- connect to a single IPv6-over-BLE border router
- maximum IPv6 packet length of 1280 bytes
- BLE L2CAP channels in LE credit-based flow control mode
BLE link layer support for version 4.1:
- BLE advertisement
- BLE connection slave

It has been tested on the TI CC2650 SensorTag and the TI CC2650 LaunchPad hardware.

Modules

The IPv6-over-BLE stack comes with the following modules:

BLE radio

The implementation of the BLE radio for the TI CC26xx platform is implemented in arch/cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/rf-core/ble-cc2650.c and arch/cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/rf-core/ble-hal/*.[ch]. These files contain all the hardware specific code for supporting BLE as a link layer.

BLE L2CAP layer

The L2CAP LE credit-based flow control support is implemented in arch/cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/rf-core/ble-l2cap.c. Besides implementing rudimentary L2CAP support, this module handles fragmentation of large IPv6 packets.

Using BLEach

Currently, BLEach is only available for the Texas Instruments CC2650 hardware platform.

The following sections describe how to configure BLEach for IPv6-over-BLE nodes and border routers.

IPv6-over-BLE node (BLE slave)

To enable IPv6 over BLE, the project conf needs to contain:

#define PACKETBUF_CONF_SIZE                   1280
#define QUEUEBUF_CONF_NUM                       1
#define UIP_CONF_BUFFER_SIZE                  1280

#define NETSTACK_CONF_RADIO                 ble_cc2650_driver
#define NETSTACK_CONF_MAC                   ble_l2cap_driver

#define RTIMER_CONF_MULTIPLE_ACCESS       1

/* 6LoWPAN settings */
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_MAC_MAX_PAYLOAD       1280
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_COMPRESSION           SICSLOWPAN_COMPRESSION_HC06
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_COMPRESSION_THRESHOLD   0  /* always use compression */
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_FRAG                    0
#define SICSLOWPAN_FRAMER_HDRLEN                0

/* network stack settings */
#define UIP_CONF_ROUTER                         0
#define UIP_CONF_ND6_SEND_NA          1

The following optional parameter can be used to configure that BLE advertisement behaviour:

#define BLE_CONF_DEVICE_NAME          "TI CC26xx device"
#define BLE_CONF_ADV_INTERVAL         25

BLE_CONF_DEVICE_NAME holds the device name that is used for advertisement, BLE_CONF_ADV_INTERVAL specifies the used advertisement interval in milliseconds.

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