NanoIP, which stands for the nano Internet Protocol, is a concept that was created to bring Internet-like networking services to embedded and sensor devices, without the overhead of TCP/IP. NanoIP was designed with minimal overheads, wireless networking, and local addressing in mind.

The protocol actually consists of two transport techniques, nanoUDP, which is an unreliable simple transport, and nanoTCP, which provides retransmissions and flow control. A socket-compatible API is provided which makes the use of the protocols very similar to that of IP protocols. The only difference is in addressing and the port range. NanoIP makes use of the MAC address of underlying network technology rather than IP addresses, which are not needed for local networks. The port range is 8-bits, 256 ports each for source and destination. In addition to nanoIP itself, a range of compact application protocols have been developed, such as nHTTP and nPing.

ICC 2003 article about nanoIP.