AVR2070
23
8240B-AVR-06/09
6 Running the IPv6 Demo
This demo requires the AT91SAM7X-EK to be used as the PAN Coordinator, due to
the Ethernet interface available on the board. The demo is separated into four parts.
The first is the ‘ping’ demo which simply verifies IPv6 network connectivity. The next
is the ‘UDP’ demo which demonstrates remote control of a node. The example sensor
application used in section 5 will then be run on IPv6. Finally a TFTP client will be
used to load new code onto an end node using IPv6. In these simple demos sleeping
will be disabled. Enabling sleep modes will be discussed later.
Familiarity of using the RUM network is required to fully understand these demos. In
particular the demo in section 5 should have been followed, verifying the webserver
on the coordinator (SAM7X) board can be reached.
In the 6LoWPAN world, the board which connects the 802.15.4 low-power wireless
network to the real IPv6 network, be it either Ethernet or WiFi, is called the “edge
router”. It lives at the edge of the 6LoWPAN network and connects it to the other IPv6
network. In this network the edge router is the PAN coordinator, or SAM7X board.
This demo may be used with full IPv6 internet connectivity if available. This is not
required to access the nodes from the local network; it is only required to access the
nodes from outside the local network.
The PAN coordinator board and AVR boards must be compiled with 6LoWPAN
support enabled. This is set by defining the IPV6LOWPAN macro to ‘1’ at build time
on both the ARM and AVR.

6.1 Computer/Network Setup

The demo will require IPv6 support on the host computer. If using Windows XP, type
the following at a command prompt to enable IPv6 support:
ipv6 install
If using Windows Vista®, or any Linux distribution with a kernel 2.24.0 or newer, IPv6
is already supported and enabled.
User interface and debug capabilities are provided through the telnet interface
described in section 4.4.

6.2 Ping Demo

Power the coordinator on, with the AVR nodes off. Navigate to the IPv4 address of
the webserver on the SAM7X board, and view the Network Table. There the IPv6
addresses for each interface will be shown. The board obtains the IPv6 prefix for the
Ethernet interface from another IPv6 router if one is detected. If no router is detected,
the hard-coded default prefix of 2001:db8:1e1:0::/64 is used and the board advertises
itself as the default router.
Note
Since this device becomes the default router, ALL IPv6 traffic on the
IPv6 network may be sent to it. However the device cannot actually
route this traffic, as it only has a connection to the 6LoWPAN network.
If only the 6LoWPAN network is being accessed this is fine; however, if
other IPv6 connectivity is requested this will break the network. To
avoid this, the SAM7X does NOT advertise itself as a default router
when another IPv6 router is detected on the network.