A novel IPv6 address configuration for a 6LoWPAN-based WBAN

Wireless body area networks are used to collect the physical parameters of the human body for monitoring. Before a wireless body area network can perform the effective and proper communication, each node in the network must be configured with a unique address. The address configuration solutions for wireless networks are usually classified into two categories: stateless solutions and stateful solutions. In the stateless approaches, duplicate address detection is employed to ensure the address uniqueness and inevitably this flooding increases the addressing cost and delay. By contrast, the stateful solutions can guarantee the address uniqueness without duplicate address detection. However, a node has to acquire an address from a remote server multi-hop away, so the address configuration cost and delay are relatively high. Moreover, the stateful solutions must store the address allocation information and perform the address reclamation. In order to reduce the addressing cost and delay, this paper proposes an address configuration scheme for a 6LoWPAN-based wireless body area network. In this scheme, the address uniqueness can be guaranteed without duplicate address detection, so address configuration cost and delay are reduced. Moreover, the released addresses can be automatically reclaimed without any extra operations, so there is always an abundant address space available for allocation. The performance of this scheme is evaluated, and the data results show that this scheme reduces the address configuration delay and cost.