  IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) is an emerging
technology to enable ubiquitous IoT services. However, there are very few
studies of the performance evaluation on real hardware environments. This paper
demonstrates the feasibility of 6LoWPAN through conducting a preliminary
performance evaluation of a commodity hardware environment, including Bluetooth
Low Energy (BLE) network, Raspberry Pi, and a laptop PC. Our experimental
results show that the power consumption of 6LoWPAN over BLE is one-tenth lower
than that of IP over WiFi; the performance significantly depends on the
distance between devices and the message size; and the communication completely
stops when bursty traffic transfers. This observation provides our optimistic
conclusions on the feasibility of 6LoWPAN although the maturity of
implementations is a remaining issue.
