IPV6 BLE chip can be powered by battery?

[Brandon]

Nordic has show coffee machine using BLE IPV6. The BLE chip on coffee machine shall work as Master for IPV6 communication with internet? If so, does this chip drain much more power than that that BLE chip without IPV6? How much it would be? If it is too much it means that BLE chip with IPV6 function can only operate with power supply and can not work with battery only!

[Petter Myhre]

You can find information regarding the latest IoT SDK here, nRF51_IoT_SDK->doc

We have implemented node role according the Internet Protocol Support Profile(IPSP). The communication between the devices is done using IPv6 packets over the BLE transport. In this BLE transport our stack will be a slave when in a connection.

In the BLE transport Connection Oriented Channels with the Credit Based Flow Control Mode is utilized. With this the first packet typically has a 23 byte payload, while the consecutive packets typically have a 27 byte payload.

IPv6 requires the maximum transmission unit (MTU) to be at least 1280 bytes, and sending this amount over the BLE transport for every IPv6 packet would add a huge overhead compared to normal BLE. However, we have implemented 6LoWPAN which compresses UDP and IPv6 headers significantly, please see this draft from IETF for more information. Because of 6LoWPAN the IPv6 overhead is typically 6 bytes for link local addresses and typically 23 bytes for global addresses. This means that you can get away with sending one BLE packet if your payload is small enough.

So the power consumption increase of sending your payload over IPv6 over BLE compared to normal BLE shouldn't be too big. For normal BLE power profile examine the S110 SoftDevice specification, Chapter 14.

Other than that, we don't have power profiles for our IP stack. Remember that the IoT SDK still is experimental.

It can operate on a battery, for how long depends on the size of the battery, and the application.

[Stian Røed Hafskjold]

1. Coffee machine was connected to a nRF DK (ipv6 node) set up as slave, with RPi as master.

2. The cup tags were just regular beacons talking to another nRF DK set up as scanner. This scanner talked to the other DK (ipv6 node) using wires (SPI or UART)

3. The RPi was connected to the computer over LAN. This means that the computer, the RPi and the coffee machine node was on the same ipv6 LAN. The RPi could have been connected to the computer over wifi as well using a WLAN router, and be accessed from the internet through this router.