The number of IoT devices, especially those in the home, is growing at an astonishing rate. Some estimates suggest that by 2025, there will be approximately 30 billion home devices. To put that in perspective, that's double the number of devices deployed in 2020.
Users in both industrial and connected home environments need these products and applications to provide them with viable and profitable services. However, the explosive growth of this technology has placed unprecedented pressure on the networks and the network technologies upon which the internet depends.
IP technologies, especially IPv6, can help enable this rapid growth. Developers, manufacturers, and IT professionals must use standardized technologies to ensure the interoperability and long-term viability of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Connectivity standards and the shift to all-IP
With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), many different connectivity standards have emerged and are in use today. Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Bluetooth were originally designed for efficient communication using specific wireless spectrum and additional protocols for pairing and messaging.
Unlike Wi-Fi, these technologies are not IP-based, but as they mature, they have all added IP capabilities. There are several reasons for this:
• Interoperability with other networks and applications. Initially, smart home technology relied on peer-to-peer or peer-to-central communication. Direct communication with other IP-connected applications, especially in the cloud, has become increasingly necessary.
• Easy to develop. IP technology is highly standardized and has a large open-source support community, which provides developers with a wider range of tools to build and deploy solutions faster.
• Native support for network technologies, voice, and video. Over time, IP technology has evolved to handle a wide range of application traffic, especially that applicable to smart homes and the Internet of Things.
IPv4 presents challenges to IoT architecture.
IPv4, along with its supporting higher-level protocols, TCP, and User Datagram Protocol, has been the backbone of the internet for decades. However, since 2015, the IPv4 address space has been exhausted, with only a handful of addresses struggling to survive. Today's IPv4-based home networks rely on a private address space maintained in conjunction with Network Address Translation (NAT), which allows a single public address to handle the hosts "behind" it within a private address space.
This presents several challenges for many IoT architectures. Using products based on different physical layer technologies, there will be numerous networks within a smart home—not just a single dedicated LAN—meaning the use of multiple dedicated address spaces and preventing simple point-to-point communication. While possible, workarounds such as NAT session traversal utilities or relying on “always-on” communication channels are complex and can be difficult for dormant devices or sensors that only poll for information occasionally.
What about IPv6?
Although IPv6 has been around for 20 years, the endurance of IPv4 has been largely driven by NAT technology, which has made many hesitant to adopt it wholesale for their network plans. However, IPv6 offers unique advantages for the Internet of Things (IoT), as it is designed for a future of billions of network connections traversing thousands of heterogeneous networks.
The sheer size of the address space alone is one of IPv6's advantages for the Internet of Things (IoT). A full IPv6 deployment completely eliminates the need for a private address space, allowing for easy bidirectional communication between devices and applications. Due to the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, operators have deployed various transitional mechanisms—such as 6rd, address and port mapping using translation, and address and port mapping using encapsulation—to run IPv4 on IPv6 backbones.
Furthermore, IPv6 significantly reduces the network overhead of bootstrapping and address allocation. Stateless address autoconfiguration allows nodes to negotiate their own network addresses without central management and allocation. This is a huge boon for any deployment with hundreds of devices on a network, and for devices that frequently come on and off.
How can you achieve more reliable IPv6 support in your products?
As mentioned above, IPv6 has received strong support from standards and the open-source community. However, rigorous and comprehensive testing of IoT and smart home products using IPv6 is absolutely necessary to make them work for end users. When considering IPv6 for your IoT products, there are some important factors to consider:
• Connect to cloud services. Can your product connect to and stay updated with the cloud services it requires? Does your IPv6 connection work correctly before and after firmware updates?
• Booting. Does your device need to be able to use both IPv4 and IPv6 network connections simultaneously? Can it boot up, receive addresses, and connect to services after a reboot or sleep mode?
• User Controls. How do end users access your product's GUI (if any)? Does the local interface or the application used for the first time work over IPv6?
• Basic service interoperability. Do the core protocols your product requires (such as DNS or Network Time Protocol) run on IPv6?
These functionalities are best checked through rigorous automated testing. Performing the aforementioned tests on every build and new firmware is crucial to ensuring that the basic IP protocol functionality has not degraded. Furthermore, even if the underlying protocol stack (often implemented from open-source code) is suitable for basic connectivity, many factors can cause a device to eventually become unusable. Frequently repeating these connectivity tests over extended periods can isolate memory leaks or fragmentation that could cause the device to lock up or become unconnectable without user intervention.
Ultimately, the connectivity prospects of the Internet of Things (IoT) are likely to continue for some time. As we move towards a world where smart products become the norm and even part of critical infrastructure, considering a migration to IP and IPv6 can help organizations navigate this beautiful new world.
