In 2015, the IETF released the RFC 7668 that specifies how IPv6 packets can be exchanged using BLE connections (IPv6 over BLE). This Contiki extenstion implements BLEach, a fully open-source IPv6-over-BLE stack for Contiki. BLEach can be used for node (BLE slave) and border router (BLE master) devices.
It was developed by
- Michael Spoerk, Graz University of Technology, michael.spoerk@tugraz.at, github user: spoerk
This IPv6-over-BLE stack is presented and evaluated in the paper: BLEach: Exploiting the Full Potential of IPv6 over BLE in Constrained Embedded IoT Devices, ACM SenSys'17.
This implementation includes:
- IPv6-over-BLE node implementation compliant to RFC 7668
- connect to a single IPv6-over-BLE border router
- maximum IPv6 packet length of 1280 bytes
- BLE L2CAP channels in LE credit-based flow control mode
- IPv6-over-BLE border router implementation compliant to RFC 7668
- connect to up to 4 different IPv6-over-BLE nodes
- maximum IPv6 packet length of 1280 bytes
- BLE L2CAP channels in LE credit-based flow control mode
- BLE link layer support for version 4.1:
- BLE advertisement
- BLE initiating
- BLE connection slave
- BLE connection master
It has been tested on the TI CC2650 SensorTag and the TI CC2650 LaunchPad hardware.
The IPv6-over-BLE stack comes with the following modules:
The implementation of the BLE radio for the TI CC26xx platform is implemented in cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/rf-core/ble-cc2650.c
and cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/rf-core/ble-hal/*.[ch].
These files contain all the hardware specific code for supporting BLE as a link layer.
A minimal version of the BLE parametrization layer is implemented in cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/net/ble-null-par.[ch].
In this minimal version the parametrization does not perform any parameter adaptation.
The L2CAP LE credit-based flow control support is implemented in cpu/cc26xx-cc13xx/net/ble-l2cap.c.
Besides implementing rudimentary L2CAP support, this module handles fragmentation of large IPv6 packets.
A simple IPv6-over-BLE UDP-client and UDP-server example is included under examples/cc26xx/cc26xx-ble-client-demo
and examples/cc26xx/cc26xx-ble-server-demo, respectively.
For IPv6-over-BLE support, IPv6 needs to be enabled and RPL needs to disabled in Contiki:
CONTIKI_WITH_RPL = 0
CONTIKI_WITH_IPV6 = 1
Currently, BLEach is only available for the Texas Instruments CC2650 hardware platform.
The following sections describe how to configure BLEach for IPv6-over-BLE nodes and border routers.
To enable IPv6 over BLE, the project conf needs to contain:
#define PACKETBUF_CONF_SIZE 1280
#define QUEUEBUF_CONF_NUM 1
#define UIP_CONF_BUFFER_SIZE 1280
#define CC26XX_CONF_RADIO_MODE CC26XX_RADIO_MODE_BLE
#define NETSTACK_CONF_RADIO ble_cc2650_driver
#define NETSTACK_CONF_RDC ble_null_par_driver
#define NETSTACK_CONF_MAC ble_l2cap_driver
#define RTIMER_CONF_MULTIPLE_ACCESS 1
/* 6LoWPAN settings */
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_MAC_MAX_PAYLOAD 1280
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_COMPRESSION SICSLOWPAN_COMPRESSION_HC06
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_COMPRESSION_THRESHOLD 0 /* always use compression */
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_FRAG 0
#define SICSLOWPAN_FRAMER_HDRLEN 0
/* network stack settings */
#define UIP_CONF_ROUTER 0
#define UIP_CONF_ND6_SEND_NA 1
The following optional parameter can be used to configure that BLE advertisement behaviour:
#define BLE_CONF_DEVICE_NAME "TI CC26xx device"
#define BLE_CONF_ADV_INTERVAL 25
BLE_CONF_DEVICE_NAME holds the device name that is used for advertisement, BLE_CONF_ADV_INTERVAL
specifies the used advertisement interval in milliseconds.
To enable IPv6 over BLE, the project conf needs to contain:
#define PACKETBUF_CONF_SIZE 1280
#define QUEUEBUF_CONF_NUM 1
#define UIP_CONF_BUFFER_SIZE 1280
#define CC26XX_CONF_RADIO_MODE CC26XX_RADIO_MODE_BLE
#define NETSTACK_CONF_RADIO ble_cc2650_driver
#define NETSTACK_CONF_RDC ble_null_par_driver
#define NETSTACK_CONF_MAC ble_l2cap_driver
#define RTIMER_CONF_MULTIPLE_ACCESS 1
/* BLE radio settings */
#define BLE_MODE_CONF_INIT_PEER_ADDR 0xAABBCCDDEEFF
/* 6LoWPAN settings */
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_MAC_MAX_PAYLOAD 1280
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_COMPRESSION SICSLOWPAN_COMPRESSION_HC06
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_COMPRESSION_THRESHOLD 0 /* always use compression */
#define SICSLOWPAN_CONF_FRAG 0
#define SICSLOWPAN_FRAMER_HDRLEN 0
/* network layer settings */
#define UIP_CONF_ROUTER 1
#define UIP_CONF_ND6_SEND_NA 1
#define UIP_CONF_ND6_SEND_RA 1
#define UIP_CONF_IP_FORWARD 0
BLE_MODE_CONF_INIT_PEER_ADDR specifies the public BLE address of the node
to which a connection should be established (0xAA is the MSB of the device address).
Currently, if the BLE master should needs to support more that a single BLE slave,
BLE_MODE_CONF_MAX_CONNECTIONS needs to be configured to the desired number of slaves and
the peer addresses of the slaves need to be configured in the ble_cc2650.c file.
The following optional defines can be used to configure the BLE connection parameters:
#define BLE_MODE_CONF_CONN_CHANNEL_MAP 0x1FFFFFFFFFULL
#define BLE_CONF_CONNECTION_INTERVAL 250
#define BLE_CONF_CONNECTION_SLAVE_LATENCY 1
BLE_MODE_CONF_CONN_CHANNEL_MAP defines the channel map used for the BLE connection (see BLE specification for further info).
BLE_CONF_CONNECTION_INTERVAL specifies the used connection interval and BLE_CONF_CONNECTION_SLAVE_LATENCY specifies the
used slave latency of the BLE connection.