Hi Phil,

Philip Levis wrote:
> I think the idea of a whiteboard is powerful. It definitely makes more 
> sense than "shout out." 

Yes. DHCP has proven itself useful, and for many reasons other than just 
avoiding "shout out".

> single coordinating node, however. Your text puts it precisely: 
> "consider that LowPANs *usually* have a sink of some sort" (emphasis 
> mine). Forcing this to be centralized requires such a node exist and 
> therefore precludes certain kinds of LowPANs.

A solution may simply be to configure your IP addresses using an IID 
derived from the EUI-64, which must be unique within a PAN. If you 
really want automatic assignment of short addresses, then that's a 
different beast. But it might not be worth the overhead.

> That being said, this approach seems to implicitly assume mesh under? 
> Nodes "use Neighbor Discovery to determine the link-layer addresses for 
> neighbors known to reside on attached links and to quickly purge cached 
> values that become invalid." ND could operate on a single hop basis. 

Let's be clear on what kind of hop. I'm sure you meant a single 15.4 
radio hop, not an IP hop.

> This simplifies everything. The place where the whiteboard approach is 
> necessary is for DAD. But given that the goal is eventual consistency on 
> address assignment, it may be possible to distribute the table in an 
> effective way.

While I agree it does simplify many things, it doesn't simplify 
everything :-). RFC 4861 explicitly assumes multicast-capable links with 
reflexive and transitive reachability. DAD is only one example. ND is 
also used for redirect and to propagate network parameters. In a 
route-over configuration, the mechanisms currently defined aren't very 
useful in a route-over 15.4 PAN. I'm currently signed up to work on an 
I-D that addresses this case, as it is an interesting case to consider.

--
Jonathan Hui

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