Dear all,

I have a lot of questions and some serious issues with the applicability
and the general description of the solution.
*So, there are two reasons for which I am against adoption of this
document.*

*Justification and use-case*
In terms of the positioning of this draft and justification of the work,
both 6LoWPAN and SCHC are cited. Yet, the only justification of why this
new work was proposed is "there could be more simplified solutions".
I'd say that firstly there is no proof in the draft that the proposed
solution is simpler. As far as I can understand the draft, it is heavily
underspecified, so knowing its full complexity is difficult at that time.
Plus, what is "simpler"?
Secondly, which are the use-cases and the justifications that cannot be met
by the currently existing solutions? I have a difficulty with the notion of
""topology is static, where nodes' location is fixed, and the connection
between nodes is also rather stable.". PLC or wireless, the channel is
fluctuating, conditions change, devices restart, or go offline.. Unless you
have point-to-point links, in which case you rarely care about compression
(unless in LPWANs where you have SCHC). The claim is that "generic IOT
solutions" can be improved, but in this document there are no examples of
what specific use-case would benefit, e.g. what size (number of nodes, size
of the tree, etc.).
Given that the draft deals heavily with forwarding as well, I think a
comparison with RPL should also be provided, along with the expected gains.
Why can't we have an Objective Function that defines Tree-like behavior,
and let RPL solve the routing?

*Technical*
On the technical side, I have a ton of questions and remarks, but I'll
start with the most obvious ones (please correct me if my understanding is
wrong):
The short addresses in your packet format may take 1 byte, 3 bytes (1 to
indicate 2B for the short address), 5 bytes (1 to indicate 4B for the short
address) or more. By looking at the way short addresses are allocated, we
will get in the 3B range after only 8 children, and will get in the 5B
range after only 16 children. This to me is comparable to what 6LoWPAN does
from the beginning.

Given the restriction of 64 bits for the size of short addresses, and the
forwarding algorithm, you can have only 63 child nodes of a parent node.
That means, that if you have 100 neighbor nodes (say, one Border Router and
99 devices in a datacenter, which may directly reach the BR), your
algorithm will artificially introduce 1 hop, so that there is a forwarder
which can provide addresses to the ones beyond the first 63. That seems
like a very serious inefficiency, which completely negates any potential
gains (which are there only for the first 8 children).

Bootstrapping the network is underspecified. When a forwarding node
receives an AR (Address Request), it will allocate an address, send the
Address Assignment (AA), and keep this allocation for how long? Given that
the child node may have selected another parent node, this needs to be
handled in some way. In a PLC network, you can have hundreds of Smart
Meters around a Data Concentrator. There is a storm of AR in the beginning,
and the first 63 forwarders will get their allocation from the root, but
the next hundreds will each allocate slots in the addressing list of the
first ones that got addresses.. and so forth and so forth. You'll need to
run simulations here, but I think it is a real danger that the network will
end up with a huge depth, and lots of allocated-but-unused addresses high
on the tree.

The draft does not address any topology change scenario. Moving subtrees
around a tree needs to be handled in some way or other. What happens if a
node restarts, then requests an address and obtains a different parent? How
would it indicate to its children (which it doesn't know anymore, by the
way), that they need to get new addresses? And how does it indicate that
change to the Border Router (root), which MAY have some External IPv6
addresses mapped to the short addresses in the network? And so on.

All in all, I have listed some of the important technical problems I see
for the moment.
But even before solving all of them - what would be the justification of
this significant work that needs to be handled by the WG?

Cheers,
Alexander




On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 2:25 PM marinos charalambides <marino...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
>
> I would also like express my support for the adoption of this draft as it
> provides a better solution for wired IoT applications as stated in the 6lo
> use case draft.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Marinos
>
>
> On 16 Aug 2022, at 03:08, Kiran Makhijani <kiran.i...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Hello,
> I have quickly skimmed through the document and would like to see this
> work progress.
>
> I see that the focus is mainly on wireless constrained devices, however,
> in industrial networks with field devices it is useful to have short and
> variable addressing schemes on a factory floor. Variable addressing
> approach is more interesting here because, on one side the controllers may
> use IPv6 addresses and field-devices on the other end can very well be
> shorter addresses.
>
> I support this document and wouldn't mind contributing to the alignment
> with above mentioned scenario.
>
> Cheers,
> Kiran
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Carles Gomez Montenegro [mailto:carle...@entel.upc.edu
> <carle...@entel.upc.edu>]
> *Sent:* Monday, August 1, 2022, 7:58 AM
> *To:* 6lo@ietf.org
> *Subject:* [6lo] Call for WG adoption of
> draft-li-6lo-native-short-address-03
>
> Dear 6lo WG,
>
> This message starts a call for WG adoption for
> draft-li-6lo-native-short-address-03.
>
> (Link 
> below:https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-li-6lo-native-short-address-03)
>
> Considering that some folks may be on vacation currently or in the next
> few days, the call will end on the 22nd of August, EOB.
>
> Please state whether you are in favor of adopting this document.
>
> Also, any comments you may have, and/or expressions of interest to review
> the document, will be very much appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Shwetha and Carles
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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