David, First off, your issue raising in this thread seems too late since our official WGLC was expired: "This Last Call will end on Wednesday 02 August 2006 at 2359 UTC."
Anyway, my sense is not to take Mesh issue at this stage. As long as we are looking at the 6lowpan solution format, mesh is out of scope of that. In fact, as far as I am concern, mesh belongs to 15.4 technology based on MAC layer. Instead, as described in the rechartering, we will go through adhoc issue based on IP layer. That's why we are here in 6lowpan wg of ietf. But, some staffs described in your mail seem helpful from the 6lowpan perspective, especially IPv6 related stuffs. If allowed, please bring your concern to the next 6lowpan face-to-face meeting in San Diego. Then, we will have further details in there I believe... -- Daniel (Soohong Daniel Park) Mobile Convergence Laboratory, SAMSUNG Electronics. On 9/21/06, David Culler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear All, I would like to raise a concern about the Mesh Delivery Field definition in Section 11 of the format document. While the actual mesh routing protocol is appropriately outside the scope of the 6lowpan Format document, that format needs provide the raw structure upon which rough consensus and running code can be flourish. We know that low power wireless mesh routing is technically tricky and strongly influenced by target traffic load, power management profile, network design, and so on. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that the consensus building and technical refinement process will require on-going experience with protocol and implementation alternatives. The 6lowpan format document should support this process, although it should not dictate its conclusion. Based on past experience with IP layer 3 routing and with past internally routed links, we can establish a few primary goals for the expressiveness of the 6lowpan Mesh Delivery Field. (1) It should support the visibility into the routed 15.4 cloud necessary to develop, debug, diagnose, and manage the 15.4 cloud. (2) It should support the ability to define, develop and compare routing protocols and possibly support the presence of multiple protocols for widely differing usage cases. (3) It needs to be possible for nodes to communicate with other nodes in the cloud in order to discover and negotiate joining the cloud without joining the cloud a priori through some mechanism that is opaque to IP and above. (1) has historically been addressed through various forms of source routing. It should be possible to do the equivalent of traceroute through the 15.4 mesh and this should be accessible in some form through IP so higher layers can be built to perform the management. The current Mesh Delivery Field definition seems to prohibit any form of source routing. It assumes that the routing tables are all set up and correct so that the forwarder can "swizzle" the destination address field of the 15.4 header with a table entry. (The experience of IP over ATM and the thousands of pages of the Q83b signalling protocol required to set up all the tables in advance ought to give us a little pause here.) The idea of supporting table-driven routing and thereby separating the route formation from the forwarding engine is a good one, but there needs to be enough expressive power to support the protocols that will establish and manage those tables (rather than relying on an opaque out-of-band signaling mechanism) and there needs to be the ability to query and validate those tables without relying on out-of-band mechanisms. (2) has historically be addressed with protocol identifiers and options. As we went through the various RIP, OSPF, etc. we didn't need to go back and redefine the format documents. There was enough expressiveness for topology formation and routing to evolve. Not all networks need to support all protocols. That has been the network designers' determination. The underlying structure provided the primitives, allowing solutions (and consensus) to evolve. We want to avoid creating a "winner take all" structure where there is no room for evolution and development. It is possible that AODV, or TinyAODV, or DSR, or GPSR or possibly one of several other alternatives is the right solution. However, there is little evidence of one having clear superiority at this time, despite numerous high profile efforts. We should be defining the canvas upon which competing alternatives can be defined and vetted. (3) has historically been addressed by a limited ability to communicate on the link to a crudely defined set of nodes in order to bootstrap the discovery, join, address assignment, negotiation, etc. Most successful links under IP look either like a broadcast medium or a point-to-point link (a degenerative broadcast). This allows ARP, RARP, BOOTP, DHCP, etc. to gain higher level accessibility and addressibility through the link. Links that require complex signaling, discovery, joining and coordnation below the link layer, including ATM, Bluetooth (piconets and scatter nets), and IRDA have proved onerous for IP and have been relegated to far less general usage scenarios - such as the desktop USB replacement. Even though the radio is a broadcast medium, the challenge in a routed link is that the link is not by default a link-wide broadcast phy. There are two natural notions of "broadcast" in a lowpan. (i) The physical neighbors that happen to receive a transmission because they are close enough to pick up the signal and have their radios turned on to receive. (ii) The entire collection of nodes that can be reached by a multihop dissemination (flood). Both of these are extremely useful in bootstrapping higher levels, including routing, and should be addressed in the format document. Additionally, it is not neccessary to use the 802.15.4 beaconing mechanism to bring up IP over a 15.4 link. Providing some forms of broadcast using data frames makes the 802.15.4 format much more like 802.11 and other links that have proved very suitable for IP. Few, if any, of the public 15.4 routing layers developed by the TinyOS community utilize beacon packets. The recognition that the current Mesh Delivery field may be to restrictive is intimated by the need to define a second form of the header for multicast (and link local broadcast) that includes a sequence number. The mesh header field type is defined by whether the destination address is unicast or multicast. The document states that the use of such a sequence number is out of scope. However, the observation that that extra information may need to be included depending on how packets are routed further suggests that more careful format definition is needed to support future development of mesh routing. Have folks who have been developing mesh layers for lowpan6 felt that the existing Mesh Delivery Field is too restrictive? David E. Culler UC Berkeley [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ 6lowpan mailing list [email protected] https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/6lowpan
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