Internetworking Between ZigBee/802.15.4 and IPv6/802.3 Network

With the rising demand of home automation and sensor networks, the IEEE 802.15.4 specification outlines a new class of physical and MAC layer protocols targeted at low power devices, personal area networks, and sensor nodes. Based on IEEE 802.15.4, many upper layer protocols are proposed. The ZigBee is the most popular one. However, the ZigBee itself is not compatible with the IP-based network. It is a great challenge to integrate these two kinds of networks together. In this paper, we proposed an internetworking mechanism to overcome this problem. The architecture forms an overlay network on both ZigBee and IPv6 networks and helps the packets to transmit crossover the regions. The design is dedicated to the IPv6 only because many features of IPv6 are used inside the framework.