Implementing Internet Protocol Support Profile (IPSP) for Bluetooth Low Energy in Android

Question

Bluetooth 4.1 introduced the Internet Protocol Support Profile, which "proposes the support of exchanging IPv6 packets between devices over the Bluetooth Low Energy transport." This Profile bypasses the regular GAP and GATT protocols and heads down directly to the L2CAP layer. It defines a "Node" and "Router" role. How would this be implemented on the Android side?

file:///Users/shreyashirday/Downloads/INT_IP_Support_Profile_SPEC_V1.0.0%20(1).pdf This was useful for an overview, but I'm not even sure current Android can support this.

Answer 1

I am also curious whether some Android devices support this already or not.

As for the profile, the best way to get an understanding of it is the following 2 RFC's:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4944

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7668

The first one describes 6LoWPAN - IPv6 over low power networks. The second one describes how 6LoWPAN is implemented specifically over Bluetooth LE. The Bluetooth SIG IPSP spec is light on the implementation details and just provides the framework for the details in these two RFC's.

The two implementations that are available right now seem to be BlueZ running on Linux v. 3.18 or newer, and the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 development boards. If there are more implementations available I would like to hear about them.