Why 6LoWPAN packet don't display 6LoWPAN header in Wireshark?

[KarHoey]

Dear developers,

I am using http://code.nsnam.org/tpecorella/ns-3-6LoWPAN/ to develop 6LoWPAN network.

It works fine, except I realized that the generated sixlowpan-X.pcap will not show its 6LoWPAN header or IPv6 header when analysis using Wireshark, it only has 802.15.4 header. But I need the data for monitoring purpose.

What is the best way I can do? Thanks for help.

[David Palacios Campos]

The same here. I used a UDP echo application over two 6LoWPAN devices and the .pcap files only showed 802.15.4 data streams.

As it is said in the documentation: "Note that using 6LoWPAN over any NetDevice other than 802.15.4 will produce valid .pcap files, but they will not be correctly dissected by Wireshark. The reason lies on the fact that 6LoWPAN was really meant to be used only over 802.15.4, so Wireshark dissectors will not even try to decode 6LoWPAN headers on top of protocols other than 802.15.4."

Although saying that using 6LoWPAN over any NetDevice other than 802.15.4 will produce valid but not fully "decodable" .pcap files, it doesn't explicit whether the .pcap files generated by using 6LoWPAN over a LrWpanNetDevice are suitable to be decoded or not in WireShark.

Do you know what could be happening?

Thanks in advance, 

David

[Tommaso Pecorella]

Hi,

you need to tell wireshark to decode 6LoWPAN even if the 802.15.4 FCS field is wrong.

FCS is not computed to save simulation time (much like for Ethernet).

T.