IPv6 is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP).  IP defines the addressing used to identify computers on the Internet and how they communicate. The original version –  IPv4, does not have enough addresses left [1].

IPv6 solves that as instead of using 32 bit addresses (4 billion) it provides 128 bit addresses (3.4×10³⁸).   Most computers run both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously without anyone noticing.

IPv6 also has extra functionality and efficiency.  6LoWPAN is designed to reduce the overhead of encapsulating data into an IPv6 packet and is designed for low power networks. While being able to give global IPv6 addresses to nodes is useful for experiments it is not essential – as a local network could work just as well – but we wanted to test all the possibilities! For example nodes can PUT data to anywhere on the Internet.

So essentially this lets us have a powerful modern Internet connection to/from the systems.