Scalability Analysis of Privacy Enabled IPv6 Addressing Protocol for Duty Cycled 6LoWPAN

The privacy enabled IPv6 addressing mechanism ensures the privacy of node's identification in the communication messages. It makes adversaries difficult to track nodes and link any activities with the nodes IP or the MAC address. Scalability of the privacy enabled IPv6 addressing scheme for 6LoWPAN may be affected due to underlying MAC layer mechanisms. Hence, this study aims to explore such impact. Addressing scheme is implemented in Contiki operating system which uses duty cycling at the MAC layer along with CSMA channel access mechanism. ContikiMAC and CXMAC are widely used duty cycling protocols in Contiki. An analytical study is presented in this paper, which analyses the IPv6 address configuration delay with ContikiMAC and CXMAC. Simulation is performed to corroborate the presented analytical model. The address configuration latency limits the scalability of the network. Hence, this paper studies the impact of duty cycling of the nodes on the address configuration latency and estimates the size of a single hop PAN. It is observed that ContikiMAC duty cycling protocol can achieve better performance compared to CXMAC protocol in terms of address configuration latency. In order to make up for the delay due to duty cycling, network can be divided into multiple PANsof smaller size where addressing process runs simultaneously.