SAN FRANCISCO, CA, 2007 - Arch Rock Corporation, the first company to offer IEEE 802.15.4 low- power wireless sensor network (WSN) systems incorporating IPv6—the latest and most scalable version of the ubiquitous Internet Protocol—has joined the IPv6 Forum. The IPv6 Forum was formed in 1999 to help create a high- quality and secure next-generation Internet with equitable worldwide access.
Arch Rock uses IPv6 in its Primer Pack/IP, a WSN solution introduced in March 2007. Primer Pack/IP was the first commercial implementation of the IETF 6LoWPAN standard, created to enable wireless IPv6 communication over IEEE 802.15.4 low-power radio for sensor nodes and other devices with limited power, memory and bandwidth. By running native IPv6 beyond the WSN gateway to the sensor nodes themselves, Primer Pack/IP enables the sensor nodes to communicate directly with other IP devices across the network and permits direct node access and management. Arch Rock contributed to the 6LoWPAN standard by helping to devise a means of compressing IPv6's powerful addressing and header information to fit into small packets whose transmission consumes minimum energy.
IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid said, "Arch Rock has been a true innovator in the IPv6 arena, enabling end-to-end IPv6 communication for the first time in wireless sensor networks. This will have broad implications for WSN applications, giving users new levels of mobility and flexibility in such areas as personnel safety, plant automation and utility management."
Arch Rock CEO Roland Acra said, "A key driver behind IPv6, achieving the scalability to let the Internet support billions of new devices, is exactly aligned with the needs of the growing wireless sensor market. Within a decade embedded devices connected to the physical world are predicted to account for a huge part of the Internet's growth, far outnumbering PCs. IPv6's extremely streamlined and efficient header structure makes it a perfect fit for limited-resource devices such as sensors, and was a critical factor in the development of the 6LoWPAN standard. We are pleased to be part of the IPv6 Forum's efforts to help proliferate this landmark advancement in Internet technology."
About the IPv6 Forum
The IPv6 Forum is a worldwide consortium of leading Internet vendors, industry experts, research and education networks, whose mission is to advocate IPv6 by improving technology, market, and deployment user and industry awareness, creating a high-quality and secure new-generation Internet and allowing world-wide equitable access to knowledge and technology. An offshoot of the IETF IPv6 working group, the IPv6 Forum holds IPv6 Worldwide Summits to share IPv6 knowledge and to promote new IPv6 applications and interoperability of IPv6 implementations. The group's honorary chairman is Vinton Cerf, the Internet pioneer widely regarded as the "father of the Internet."
About Arch Rock Corporation
Arch Rock is a pioneer in open-standards-based wireless sensor network technology. The company's products, which gather data from the physical world and integrate it into the enterprise IT infrastructure using IP networking and web services, are used in environmental monitoring, tracking and logistics, industrial automation and control. Arch Rock's founders, while at the University of California-Berkeley and Intel Research, did seminal research and development work on WSNs, creating three generations of wireless sensor nodes, mesh networking protocols, and the leading operating system for sensor networks. For more information, visit the company's Web site.