Hello Martine

Great to hear about your implementation. The group is interested to learn about 
your progress (keep us tuned) and happy to help you through. P
lease do not hesitate to ask for more clarification as you feel needed. Even if 
you’re not too sure you should ask, if you wonder there’s probably a reason and 
you’re helping the implementors who will be following you.

Please see below:

I have an implementation question for the virtual reassembly buffer with 
regards to [draft-ietf-6lo-fragment-recovery]. Section 6.1 of this draft states 
that a tuple (source address, tag) is used to identify a VRB entry and cites 
[draft-ietf-6lo-minimal-fragment] for that.

Ø    Correct, and the meaning is source MAC address not source IP address. The 
exact sentence is

Ø                                       Upon a first fragment (i.e. with a

Ø     sequence of zero), a VRB and the associated LSP state are created for

Ø     the tuple (source MAC address, datagram_tag) and the fragment is

Ø     forwarded along the IPv6 route that matches the destination IPv6

Ø     address in the IPv6 header as prescribed by

Ø     
[I-D.ietf-6lo-minimal-fragment<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6lo-fragment-recovery-05#ref-I-D.ietf-6lo-minimal-fragment>].

Ø
However, as far as I understand [draft-ietf-6lo-minimal-fragment] and 
[draft-ietf-lwig-6lowpan-virtual-reassembly] this is not the case. 
[draft-ietf-6lo-minimal-fragment] doesn't mention VRB entry identification and 
only refers to [draft-ietf-lwig-6lowpan-virtual-reassembly].

  *   It would not hurt to mention it though. Interesting. Minimal has:” All 
fragments are tagged with a 16-bit

   "    Each datagram can be uniquely identified by the source and final

   destination link-layer addresses of the frame that carries it, the

   fragment size and the datagram_tag.



Ø    That’s  misleading… I’ll correct it.
That in turn only recounts the classic (source address, destination address, 
size, tag) tuple defined in RFC4944

  *   When receiving a fragment, the destination is self and the size may vary 
from a datagram to the next. So the only thing that really identify the 
datagram is the source MAC and the tag.
and states that the only difference between the classic and VRB is the lack of 
the reassembled packet and addition of the next hop's address and the newly 
assigned tag:

Ø    Actually the forwarder sends the datagram with self as source to the 
source mac address is swapped naturally. It has to set the next hop’s mac 
address and the swapped datagram tag. The next hop’s MAC address identifies the 
node that should receive the packet and the datagram tag together with the 
source mac identify the reassembly buffer within the receiver. There is no 
contradiction.
To reduce the memory requirement for reassembly buffers, the implementation may 
opt to not keep the actual packet data in the reassembly buffer. Instead, it 
may attempt to send out the data for a fragment in the form of a forwarded 
fragment, as soon as all necessary information for that is available. 
Obviously, all fragments need to be sent with the same outgoing address 
(otherwise a full reassembly implementation would discard the fragments) and 
the same datagram_tag.

So my question is: Is the tuple definition in 
[draft-ietf-6lo-fragment-recovery] really correct?


  *   It is.

For exclusion datagram size I agree that it could be somewhat redundant. 
However, a node could have multiple destination addresses (either via multiple 
interfaces or IEEE-802.15.4-style short and long address). So, as the tag is 
link-specific (defined by a (source, destination) tuple), there could be 
distinct datagrams that have the same tuple (source, tag), or am I missing 
something?


Ø    Yes, the role of the destination MAC address is to reach the next hop, but 
does not change the processing within that node. I could change the L2 address 
I use to refer to the next hop in the middle of a fragmented packet, it is 
still the same fragmented packet. In other words, please do not use the dmac as 
to index the VRB. From your question I think the LWIG draft should clarify, and 
we can change minimal draft to clarify as well.

I already implemented the VRB with draft-ietf-6lo-minimal-fragment in mind and 
thus used the classic 4-tuple for indexing. But now I'm wondering: Can I reduce 
its index or would that be not advised?


Ø    You should reduce the index : ) There can not be 2 different datagrams 
coming in parallel from a same previous hop and with a same datagram tag. There 
must be a sentence somewhere in the LWIG draft that says that a new and 
currently unused datagram tag is chosen for a new incoming datagram, correct?  
Minimal says

Ø                                                                Upon

Ø     receiving a fragment from node A with a datagram_tag previously

Ø     unseen from node A, node B allocates a buffer large enough to hold

Ø     the entire packet.



Ø    This text only indexes the VRB with any identifier of node A and the tag… 
And this is correct. What’s a bit more ugly is that Node A should not change 
the source MAC in between fragments because that will confise node B. I need to 
add text on that too.


Many thanks Martine for raising all this, and all the best for your 
implementation.

Pascal
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