Wi-SUN Overview#

Getting Started with Wi-SUN#

Wireless Smart Ubiquitous Network (Wi-SUN) is the leading IPv6 sub-GHz mesh technology for smart city and smart utility applications. Wi-SUN brings Smart Ubiquitous Networks to service providers, utilities, municipalities/local government, and other enterprises, by enabling interoperable, multi-service, and secure wireless mesh networks. Wi-SUN can be used for large-scale outdoor IoT wireless communication networks in a wide range of applications covering both line-powered and battery-powered nodes.

Silicon Labs' Wi-SUN solution is certified by the Wi-SUN Alliance, a global industry association devoted to seamless LPWAN connectivity. Wi-SUN builds upon open standard Internet protocols (IP) and APIs, enabling developers to extend existing infrastructure platforms to add new capabilities. Built to scale with long-range capabilities, high-data throughput, and IPv6 support, Wi-SUN simplifies wireless infrastructure for industrial applications and the evolution of smart cities.

As such, Silicon Labs provides a complete set of hardware and software solutions to help developers design their Wi-SUN wireless products:

Alongside those resources, the developers can rely on an extended list of documents:

Wi-SUN Stack#

The Wi-SUN stack API is the primary Application Programming Interface (API) for applications running on Silicon Labs EFR32 Wireless Gecko SoCs to interact with the Silicon Labs Wi-SUN FAN wireless stack. It allows the application to manage the connection to a Wi-SUN FAN network as well as to communicate with other devices in the network using a socket-based communication interface.

See the Wi-SUN Stack API for more details.

Wi-SUN Security#

See Wi-SUN Security for a brief overview of Wi-SUN security concepts and device certificate requirements.

Stack Plugins#

Wi-SUN stack plugin components are software modules tightly linked to the stack that provide means to customize it: debug, manufacturing or Wi-SUN specific optional features. They can have significant impact on key capabilities and footprint.

Service Components#

The following software components are provided to help and accelerate Wi-SUN application developments by offering common functionalities. They can easily be added to an existing Wi-SUN application through Simplicity Studio graphical interface. The components are shared in source code in the Gecko SDK.

  • Application Core provides a set of high-level helper APIs designed to ease the application development.

  • Wi-SUN Util API provides utility functions.

  • POSIX-compliant Socket provides a POSIX-compliant socket implementation on top of the stack socket API.

  • CoAP provides a CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) implementation running on top of the Wi-SUN stack.

  • Ping provides a ping implementation based on the ICMPv6 protocol.

  • iPerf provides an iPerf2 implementation to test the throughput over UDP.

Versioning#

Silicon Labs Wi-SUN solution follows the Semantic Versioning guidelines for release cycle transparency and to maintain backward compatibility.