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Modified and Improved IPv6 Header Compression (MIHC) Scheme for 6LoWPAN

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Abstract

Internet of Things with the use of sensors has opened a huge window for applications in almost every area of life and its penetration is endless with wireless connectivity. It is resulting in communication among sensor nodes connected in a low power wireless personal area network (LoWPAN). This requires transmission of IPv6 packets over Low-power wireless personal area network and is called 6LoWPAN. The frame size of 802.15.4 (IEEE standard for wireless network) is only of 127 bytes. The large sized headers like link layer header, security bits, IPv6 header, and UDP header consume most of the packet space leaving only 28 bytes for actual payload. Hence to provide a substantial number of bytes for the payload, header compression becomes a necessity in 6LoWPAN. Header compression also leads to smaller packet size which in turn will consume less bandwidth and power. 6LoWPAN is a resource constraint environment in which such a thing is desirable. Hence IPv6 header compression is 6LoWPAN not only provides more space for data payload but it also consumes less power, bandwidth and results in lesser delays. This paper proposes “Modified and Improved IPv6 Header Compression” (MIHC), a compression technique for IPv6 header in 6LoWPAN environment. The compression mechanism is based on correlation of headers present in the packets which are being transmitted from a source node to destination. We have implemented it in Contiki 3.0 and simulated using Cooja simulator. Results shows that the proposed mechanism MIHC outperforms IPHC and NO_COMP with 20 and 76% higher throughput, 13 and 38% lesser delay, 12 and 37% less round trip time and 13 and 39% reduced packet size respectively. Application of T test on measured values shows a significant difference (p < 0.5) between No header compression case i.e. NO_COMP and our proposed algorithm i.e. MIHC.

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  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Applications, Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, M.P., India

    Ruchi Garg & Sanjay Sharma

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  1. Ruchi Garg
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  2. Sanjay Sharma
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Correspondence to Ruchi Garg.

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Garg, R., Sharma, S. Modified and Improved IPv6 Header Compression (MIHC) Scheme for 6LoWPAN. Wireless Pers Commun 103, 2019–2033 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-5894-z

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