Efficient IPv6 Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Environment

Abstract: As the address space of IPv4 is being depleted with the development of IoT (Internet Of Things), there is an increasing need for permanent transition to the IPv6 protocol as soon as possible. Nowadays, many 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Networks have implemented or will implement IPv6 in the near future for Internet access. These networks will also use NDP (Neighbor Discovery Protocol), which is the IPv6 tailored version of ARP (Address Resolution Protocol). The protocol is responsible for address auto-configuration, maintaining lists of all neighbors connected to a network, verifying if they are still reachable, managing prefixes and duplicate address detection. The protocol is defined in RFC 4861 and although it works fine for wired connected devices, it has been proven highly inefficient in terms of battery lifetime saving, when wireless networks came to the market and its use increased tremendously. This thesis work is a continuation of a previous master thesis and complements the work done previously by showing how the solutions suggested in the new draft can be implemented at the router and host side and practically confirms the previous results of the theoretical analysis through simulation scenarios of sleep and wake-up of the nodes, performed in OMNeT++. Subsequently, the scalability of the system as a whole was analyzed with a simulation model containing a range of hosts from 1 to 100, and shows it can operate efficiently on a larger scale, reducing multicast messaging by almost 100%, presumably saving their battery power.