Header Compression and Neighbor Discovery in 6LoWPAN based IoT - a survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next generation technology which is expected to bring a major revolution in the art of creating smarter environments. In order to uniquely identify each device in smart environment, a new protocol using IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) has been developed which supports management of sleep cycles of device for power management. However issues in a LoWPAN networks include bountiful utilization of bandwidth due to over dissemination of packets during Neighbor Discovery (ND) and headers with larger size lead to prodigal power consumption leading to short network life. This paper is a survey on state-of-art of ND techniques like ND++, Context Aware Resource Discovery (CARD) & HC techniques like Generic Header Compression, compressed DTLS in 6LoWPAN. The outcomes of the survey show that there is a prospect of optimization in ND and HC, with a clear aim to enhance the efficiency of 6LoWPAN for the low power and low processing capabilities of IoT devices.