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Contiki-NG

boards IoT-LAB M3 Microchip SAMR21 OpenMoteB ST B-L072Z-LRWAN1 Zolertia Firefly

Description

Contiki-NG is an open-source, cross-platform operating system for Next-Generation IoT devices. It focuses on dependable (secure and reliable) low-power communication and standard protocols, such as IPv6/6LoWPAN, 6TiSCH, RPL, and CoAP. Contiki-NG comes with extensive documentation, tutorials, a roadmap, release cycle, and well-defined development flow for smooth integration of community contributions.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, Contiki-NG sources are distributed under the terms of the 3-clause BSD license. This license gives everyone the right to use and distribute the code, either in binary or source code format, as long as the copyright license is retained in the source code.

Contiki-NG started as a fork of the Contiki OS and retains some of its original features.

Source: Contiki-NG on GitHub

Support for IoT-LAB boards

Setup

Due to licensing compatibility issues on hardware drivers, IoT-LAB boards support is not present in Contiki-NG official release. However, the Contiki-NG’s build system enables compiling with arch directory at arbitrary paths. So we use this feature and provide such a directory with the iot-lab/iot-lab-contiki-ng repository:

git clone https://github.com/iot-lab/iot-lab-contiki-ng.git
cd iot-lab-contiki-ng

It also includes a Contiki-NG release (version 4.4) as a git submodule, so, if you don’t have to work with your specific Contiki-NG version, you can retrieve the submodule version with the following command:

git submodule update --init

Compilation options

The Contiki-NG TARGET name for this port is iotlab, so in order to compile an application you need to invoke GNU make as follows: Here are make targets/variables and values to use with IoT-LAB boards:

  • TARGET=iotlab
  • BOARD=m3 for an IoT-LAB M3 or BOARD=a8-m3 for an IoT-LAB A8-M3
  • ARCH_PATH: path (absolute or relative) to the IoT-LAB arch directory

For example, here is the set of commands to use to compile the hello-world example from the submodule release for the IoT-LAB M3 board:

cd contiki-ng/examples/hello-world
ARCH_PATH=../../../arch make TARGET=iotlab BOARD=m3 savetarget
ARCH_PATH=../../../arch make

Note: An ARM compiler (v.7) is available on the SSH frontends.

Border Router and IPv6 networking on IoT-LAB

To connect to the serial link of your border router and propagate an IPv6 prefix through your network, Contiki-NG provides the tunslip6 tool. It bridges the Contiki-NG border router (one of your experimentation node) to the host (SSH frontend or embedded Linux environment) via a tun interface, using SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) to encapsulate and pass IP traffic to and from the other side of the serial line.

For boards based on a microcontroller

Usually, Tunslip needs sudo privileges to be able to create a dedicated tun interface. Since the command has to be launched from the SSH frontend to have access to serial link, where you are not part of the sudoers, you have to use a wrapper we developed:

sudo tunslip6.py -v2 -L -a <node-id> -p 20000 fd00::1/64
  • The usual -s option to specify the local device, is replaced by the -a and -p options to specify respectively server address and server port. It points at the TCP redirection of the border router serial link.
  • fd00::1/64 is the virtual network interface (i.e. TUN) IPv6 address. This address is of the form <ipv6_prefix>::1/64. The prefix can be replaced by another local prefix, or even by a public prefix (see IPv6).

For boards running an embedded Linux

Get the Contiki-NG release onto the embedded Linux environment, either by the official repository or by the IoT-LAB’s one. In the later case, don’t forget to initialize submodules (see Setup). We recommend you to put it in your ~/shared directory, you won’t need to perform this download and the tunslip6 compilation again.

Then, compile tunslip6 tool from the embedded environment:

cd <path-to-contiki-ng>/tools/serial-io
make tunslip6

Launch tunslip6 from the embedded node, using the serial link to the co-microcontroller, which has to run a border router firmware:

./tunslip6 -v2 -L -s <device> -B 500000 fd00::1/64
  • the -s option specifies the local device; for example, for IoT-LAB A8-M3 boards the M3 co-microcontroller’s serial link is /dev/ttyA8_M3
  • fd00::1/64 is the virtual network interface (i.e. TUN) IPv6 address. This address is of the form <ipv6_prefix>::1/64. The prefix can be replaced by another local prefix, or even by a public prefix. In this later case, get it thanks to environment variables set in the embedded Linux environment: 
    root@node-a8-1:~# printenv
...
INET6_PREFIX_LEN=64
INET6_PREFIX=2001:660:5307:3001
...