Internal Map of the Nanostack 6LoWPAN Stack

There exist several open source 6LoWPAN stacks for researchers to experiment with. However, they often lack sufficient and in-depth description of the internal operation, which makes extending the stacks difficult for many of us. This paper provides detailed documentation of the internal logic of an implemented and working 6LoWPAN stack, Nanostack (v1.1). We present first the main architecture of the stack and subsequently describe the path followed by a packet transiting the different layers. The logic in each one of the layers is explained with exception of the ICMP layer. Finally at the end of the paper we observe Nanostack from user’s perspective and discuss features and problems that we noticed in the stack.