Hi Alexander,

Thanks for your feedback. Please send us the tons of questions you have we will 
do our best to answer them.

In general I think that the concerns that you are expressing can be solved 
during the normal life cycle of a draft as a WG item.

A few more specific comments inline.

Ciao

Luigi

From: 6lo <6lo-boun...@ietf.org> On Behalf Of Alexander Pelov
Sent: Friday, 19 August 2022 17:03
To: marinos charalambides <marino...@gmail.com>
Cc: 6lo@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [6lo] Call for WG adoption of draft-li-6lo-native-short-address-03

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"?

[LI] I agree that the text is unclear and misleading. We will revise this part 
of the text making sure there is no benefits overclaiming.


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.).

[LI] This thread contains a few emails referring to use-cases. Those might not 
be relevant to you, but they are for those who posted the emails.


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?

[LI] The document never claims that NSA solve problems that cannot be solved in 
other ways. Yes, you can do a lot of things with RPL. It does not mean that it 
has to remain the only solution given that IMO there are a few people here that 
are interested in this alternative solution.
As for the comparison with RPL, that is more of an academic approach that a 
real requirement for a draft.
(Your question is valid and hopefully, with a bit more time we will be able to 
publish an academic paper on the topic.)

Technical
On the technical side, I have a ton of questions and remarks,

[LI] Please send them to us.


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.

[LI] Yes it is comparable, which makes NSA no less good.


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).

[LI] The draft never claim to be the best solution in any scenario (beside, 
note that you just did give a use-case….).
There are other scenarios where NSA definitely is not the best fit, it does not 
make the whole solution technically invalid.
You just provided one possible counter example.



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?

[LI] NSA leverages on 6LOWPAN-ND, and includes an explicit “Expected Address 
Lifetime”. Please have a look and send any concern you may have.

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.

[LI] The storm problem above is not specific to NSA. Can happen with other 
technologies. This is again a single counter example that does not make NSA 
technically invalid.

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.

[LI] That is correct and the topic is so important that we prepared a different 
document discussing exactly these points.
I would really appreciate your feedback on that one.


All in all, I have listed some of the important technical problems I see for 
the moment.

[LI] I would rephrase the above as “a few counter example where NSA is not the 
best solution”,  I do not see important technical drawbacks in your email.


But even before solving all of them - what would be the justification of this 
significant work that needs to be handled by the WG?

[LI] I am not sure I understand the question. Are you saying that there so much 
to do that the WG should not do it?
It looks a bit awkward since adoption should be driven on something else that 
work volume IMO.
Beside I have the impression a few here are ready to do it.

Ciao

Luigi


Cheers,
Alexander




On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 2:25 PM marinos charalambides 
<marino...@gmail.com<mailto: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<mailto: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]
Sent: Monday, August 1, 2022, 7:58 AM
To: 6lo@ietf.org<mailto: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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