Thread was designed with one goal in mind: To create the very best way to connect and control products in the home. Doing this well requires building a technology that uses and combines the best of what's out there to create a networking protocol that can help the connected home realize its potential for years to come.
Historically, constrained embedded devices have used specialized, and often proprietary, communication protocols. By contrast, the internet and world wide web are built on a layered stack of open standards, with each layer independent and not tied to a specific application. This is why the internet and its applications are so flexible and pervasive.
Over the last few years, technology has emerged to use internet standards with these constrained embedded devices, allowing devices and applications to be developed independently and run anywhere - the cloud, mobile devices, and in home devices.
Since we're building for the Internet of Things (IoT), it only made sense for the Thread Group to incorporate the internet and its open standards to create an Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 (IPv6)-based mesh network with 6LoWPAN as its foundation, running on standard 802.15.4 radios.
So What's IPv6 and Why Thread Choose It?
IPv6 is the internet's next-generation network protocol, designed to replace the current network, IP version 4. In order to communicate over the internet, computers and other devices must have sender and receiver addresses. These numeric addresses are known as Internet Protocol addresses.
In addition to extreme address scalability, allowing for literally trillions of IP addresses, IPv6 provides a number of other benefits:
- End-to-end Routing and Addressability
Two IPv6 endpoints, whether on the same Thread mesh, across networks, or across the world, can communicate end-to-end with straightforward and well-understood internet routing moving the packets from one endpoint to the other.
- Easy Manageability
Unlike IPv4 networks, IPv6 networks are inherently auto-configuring, removing the need for users and system administrators alike to worry about address assignment, DHCP servers, etc.
- Well-known and Familiar
IP networks are well known by engineers, developers, technicians, and system administrators alike, leveraging a rich base of knowledge and experience.
- Flexible
Supports a rich variety of upper-layer protocols, including transports, sessions, security, and applications.
How Thread Being Built on IPv6 Will Really Help Users
With Thread's adoption of IPv6 and, in turn, consumer adoption of Thread, the ground work will be laid for an open, routable IPv6 network infrastructure for the connected home. This open network infrastructure will not only support the heterogeneous devices and applications of today but, as with the internet at large, the heterogeneous devices and applications of tomorrow that will develop and evolve over time, all operating on the same underlying network.