Samita Chakrabarti wrote:
... That way, periodic RA will not wake up
 all the nodes in the 6lowpan. ...

To the best of my knowledge, 802.15.4 implementations power-down
the radio when the system sleeps.  As such, a broadcast packet
does not wake a sleeping 802.15.4 node.  Rather, the packet
is simply never received by the sleeping node.

If my understanding about this behavior is incorrect, someone
please correct me.  I have been meaning to check and see what
the spec says about this, but haven't yet...

Given that the response to broadcast packets differs in 802.16
networks (where an idle node wakes to process the packet) and
802.15.4 networks (where a sleeping node is never even aware
of the packet), different solutions are probably required.

To reiterate what I have said before, I believe that we must
explicitly specify the behavior we expect of multicast in
6lowpan networks that contain sleeping nodes.  In particular,
does multicast mean "received by the potentially very small
percentage of the nodes that aren't currently sleeping" or might
it mean "received by every node after they wake up [whenever
day that might be]"?  After we specify the behavior of multicast,
then we can then try to figure out whether we can actually
implement that behavior in a useful way.

In the interim, I suggest a moratorium on simply assuming that
multicast is a potential solution to any of the challenges
we face (e.g., duplicate address detection, router announcements,
neighbor discovery, ...)

-tjs



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