Hi,

I am sending this message to the 6lowpan, ROLL and MANET mailing list,
since I think this topic concerns all three working groups, and I am
not sure in which WG this is to be tackled.

During the MANET WG meeting and also during an OLSRv2 Interop
workshop, we had discussions about SNMP deployments in such ad-hoc
networks we are dealing with. The issue that was raised (and which is
also described in draft-hamid-6lowpan-snmp-optimizations) is that SNMP
may be too memory-/CPU-/bandwidth-consuming for low-power devices.
However, a solution for monitoring and management of these devices is
desired (and also required by IETF). The before-mentioned draft
describes very well how to optimize SNMP for running it on 6lowpan
devices, and shows that the SNMP payload can fit into 6lowpan packets.
However, it is unclear whether the code footprint of SNMP
implementations can fit into the memory of small devices. From
discussions with several persons from the MANET WG, I conclude that
for MANET the same problem exists. (and I think for ROLL, too?)

I have several questions that came to my mind about this topic:

- First of all, to which WG does this issue belong to? Or is it -- as
I suppose -- a common problem for the three working groups addressed
in this mail?
- Is this really an issue? Are there implementations of SNMP (maybe
not open-source) that can be run on very small devices such as
considered in 6lowpan/ROLL/MANET? Is there any experimental (or
theoretical) analysis whether SNMP (or any other standardized
management protocol) can run on these devices?
- If SNMP cannot be used for small devices, how can we manage and
monitor these devices then? (e.g. using proxies, different message
formats such as proposed in 6lowapp, etc.). Do we need a different
lightweight protocol for management?
 - Can we provide SNMP not only on a single device, but for a whole
network? That might need an aggregator device that runs full SNMP and
collects the data from the low power devices. This would imply to
monitor statistics of a whole network (e.g. number of links, average
throughput, average path-length, etc.)
 - What kind of objects should be provided in a MIB running on a
MANET/6lowpan/ROLL device? This might be specific to the routing
protocol, but there can be commonalities.

Regards,
Ulrich
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