#39: Ralph's INT AREA review

Changes (by [email protected]):

 * status:  new => assigned


Comment:

 Dear all:

 I created issue 39 to address Ralph’s comments; The changes are quite
 extensive, but I tried to maintain the content to the level of 08.
 The result is already visible in https://bitbucket.org/6tisch/draft-ietf-
 6tisch-architecture/src/063a04bd273af1cc7e1ae67d0e26e8f9ef28b24c/draft-
 ietf-6tisch-architecture-09.txt?at=master
 And will be discussed tomorrow at the interim call per the published
 agenda.

 The proposed new structure looks like as; per Ralph’s suggestion I grouped
 sections 3, 4 and 5 into a high level architecture and actually made
 smaller more specific subsections:

 1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
    2.  Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
    3.  High Level Architecture  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
      3.1.  6TiSCH Stack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
      3.2.  TSCH: A Deterministic MAC Layer  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
      3.3.  Scheduling TSCH  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
      3.4.  Routing and Forwarding Over TSCH . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
      3.5.  A Non-Broadcast Multi-Access Radio Mesh Network  . . . . .  9
      3.6.  A Multi-Link Subnet Model  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
      3.7.  Join Process and Registration  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
     3.8.  Dependencies on Work In Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
    4.  Deeper Dive  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
      4.1.  6LoWPAN (and RPL)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
        4.1.1.  RPL Leaf Support in 6LoWPAN ND . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
        4.1.2.  RPL Root And 6LBR  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
      4.2.  TSCH and 6top  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
        4.2.1.  6top . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
          4.2.1.1.  Hard Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
          4.2.1.2.  Soft Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
        4.2.2.  6top and RPL Objective Function operations . . . . . . 16
        4.2.3.  Network Synchronization  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
        4.2.4.  SlotFrames and Priorities  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
        4.2.5.  Distributing the reservation of cells  . . . . . . . . 19
      4.3.  Communication Paradigms and Interaction Models . . . . . . 21
      4.4.  Schedule Management Mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
        4.4.1.  Static Scheduling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
        4.4.2.  Neighbor-to-neighbor Scheduling  . . . . . . . . . . . 22
        4.4.3.  Remote Monitoring and Schedule Management  . . . . . . 23
        4.4.4.  Hop-by-hop Scheduling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
      4.5.  Forwarding Models  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
        4.5.1.  Track Forwarding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
         4.5.1.1.  Transport Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
          4.5.1.2.  Tunnel Mode  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
          4.5.1.3.  Tunnel Metadata  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
        4.5.2.  Fragment Forwarding  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
        4.5.3.  IPv6 Forwarding  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
      4.6.  Centralized vs. Distributed Routing  . . . . . . . . . . . 32
        4.6.1.  Packet Marking and Handling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
    5.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
    6.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
      6.1.  Join Process Highlights  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
    7.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
      7.1.  Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
      7.2.  Special Thanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
      7.3.  And Do not Forget  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
    8.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
      8.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

 More below:
 Summary
 -------
 This document is not ready for publication.  It needs to address several
 technical and editorial issues before publication.  In my opinion, the
 document:

 * misses the intent of an "architecture" document
 > I read that the actionable is the below, for which the above is an
 introduction

 * mixes high-level architecture with more complete design or specification
 content
 > I separated them now as section 3 and 4 and moved some text to adapt.

 * misses some architecture components
 > There is now a clearer section “3.8.  Dependencies on Work In Progress”.
 Text was added on the deterministic work.

 * is incomplete and/or has been submitted for publication prior to
 completion of the architecture design
 > I removed all references to volumes. The WG will withhold the document
 till is is complete or the WG aborts, whichever comes first.

 Substantive/technical issues
 -----------------------------

 This document seems to be a work in progress.  There are several
 references to "first volume of the 6TiSCH architecture".  In my opinion,
 it should be possible to write a description of the architecture in a
 single document.  If not, then there should be a plan for what aspects of
 the architecture will go into other volumes.  This document can't be
 assessed for completeness without some overview of the entire
 architecture.  It might be that the WG would be better served by
 publishing the key components of this document in a more dynamic way, such
 as in a wiki, and then publish the final architecture when the component
 protocols and specifications are complete.
 > We are now following your recommendation, sections 3.3 and 3.4



 In my opinion, this document contains aspects of an architecture document,
 a requirements document and a design specification.  However, it is
 missing some key aspect of each kind of document.  For example, section 8
 gives what I consider to be a description of the communication paradigms
 that are part of the architecture.  The communication paradigms are
 described (for the most part) in the abstract, without specifying the
 design of how those paradigms are implemented.
 > That text was expanded

 > The following table was added to clarify what works with what that was
 also a comment by Kris about the apparent combinatory expansion which is
 fact is not there):

 +---------------------+------------+-----------------------------------+
 |   Forwarding Model  |  Routing   |          Scheduling               |
 +=====================+============+===================================+
 |G-MPLS Track Fwrding |     PCE    |Remote Monitoring and Schedule Mgt |
 +---------------------+------------+-----------------------------------+
 |                     |            |   Static (Minimal Configuration)  |
 +  classical IPv6     +     RPL    +-----------------------------------+
 |         /           |            |   Neighbor-to-Neighbor (SF0)      |
 + 6LoWPAN Fragment F. +------------+-----------------------------------+
 |                     |Reactive P2P|        Hop-by-Hop (TBD)           |
 +---------------------+------------+-----------------------------------+

 Section 6, on the other hand, gives specific design details that would be
 better expressed in a design or specification document.
 > I removed the text that looked like requirement or design (regarding 6lo
 which is now handling it) and pointed at the 6BBR draft that is pending
 adoption.


 Similarly, section 10 specifies the current, preliminary design for the
 join process, rather than an architecture for security that describes all
 of the required security functions and how they relate to each other.
 > That we still have to work out as a WG but we are chartering for it.


 Several key pieces of the design and architecture are missing.  While I
 understand that this is the "first volume" of a suite of architecture
 documents, it seems to me that decisions about:

 * How do applications interact with the network to request deterministic
 behavior of a datagram, a flow, a bundle of flows?
 * How does the network report back to an application in the case where the
 deterministic behavior can't be met, or in the case where the network
 status has changed and an existing reservation can no longer be met?
 * How is centralized track computation performed?
 * How will the PCE/NME interact with other, autonomous functions such as
 the routing protocol?  Or, will the PCE/NME control all forwarding?
 > Clarified relation with the detnet work and provided details in “4.4.3.
 Remote Monitoring and Schedule Management”. Note that there are
 indeterminations so I can only state expectations or goals.
   With respect to Centralized routing and scheduling, the 6TiSCH
   Architecture is (expected to be) be an extension of the detnet work
    Deterministic Networking Architecture [I-D.finn-detnet-architecture],
 > Also added a general architecture picture inherited from RFC 7426


 need to be made before decisions about the following can be made:

 * using a hierarchical multi-link subnet architecture
 * management protocols
 * routing protocols
 * scheduling protocols
 * fragment forwarding
 > these are agreements that the group made over the last 2 years, and the
 architecture tracked. Mostly cast in stone by now, but for the fragment
 thing that is still an open issue with 6lo.



 What, precisely, are the requirements?  I see this text:

    traffic that is highly sensitive to jitter, quite
    sensitive to latency, and with a high degree of operational
    criticality so that loss should be minimized at all times.

 What are the time scales for jitter and latency - nanoseconds,
 microseconds, milliseconds?  What are acceptable loss rates?  What are the
 tradeoffs between loss and jitter/latency?
 > I agree that text about that would be informative. Typical control loops
 are in the order of a second, but a tight schedule could run down to a few
 Hundredths of seconds if energy is not an issue. Actual numbers for the
 process control industry are given in section 2.1 of
 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-roll-rpl-industrial-
 applicability-02 which is referenced. Should we have more in this
 particular document?


 What are the requirements for mobility?  Do those requirements mandate the
 hierarchical multi-link subnet architecture?
 > I agree that text about that would be informative there too. There is
 usually no physical mobility in the classical sense, at least when
 deterministic scheduling is involved. But the radio conditions may make it
 so that a device reparents elsewhere, ending up attached to a different
 backbone router. There’s also the case of a fully machine that is moved
 elsewhere and reconnects. So the answer is yes. But note that the RPL mesh
 is NBMA so already a multilink subnet though homogeneous.

 I'm not a security person, but it seems to me that relying solely on L2
 security as described in section 10 is inadequate.  The details of the
 join procedure belong in another document.
 >We’ll be working on it with the new charter but I cannot contribute text
 at this point. We have great discussion on the ML though.




 Editorial issues
 ----------------
 I think the abstract should read something like:

    This document describes a network architecture that provides
    low-latency, low-jitter and high-reliability packet delivery.  It
    combines a high speed powered backbone and subnetworks using IEEE
    802.15.4 time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH) to meet the
    requirements of industrial deterministic applications.

 > OK but for “industrial” which is not the scope for 6TiSCH. What about
 “   requirements of LowPower wireless deterministic applications.” ?


 In general, try to avoid time-dependent references.  For example:

    TSCH was introduced with the IEEE802.15.4e
    [IEEE802154e] amendment and will be wrapped up in the next revision
    of the IEEE802.15.4 standard.

 only makes sense at the time the document is published.
 > OK the sentence now reads

                                                   TSCH was initially
 introduced with the
 IEEE802.15.4e amendment [IEEE802154e]of the IEEE802.15.4 standard
 and constituted a part of the standard from that day



 Also try to avoid "new"; for example, change:
 > removed all irrelevant occurences of “new”


    At the same time, a new breed of Time Sensitive Networks is being
    developed to enable traffic that is highly sensitive to jitter, quite
    sensitive to latency, and with a high degree of operational
    criticality so that loss should be minimized at all times.

 to:

    Time Sensitive Networks enable traffic that is highly sensitive to
    jitter, quite sensitive to latency, and with a high degree of
    operational criticality so that loss should be minimized at all
    times.
 > adopted as is

 What is the "different time scale" for TSN and TSCH?  The document gives
 no sense about the relative requirements and operational characteristics
 of TSN and TSCH.
 > added “several orders of magnitude”. 6TiSCH subdivises the line rate
 that is originally at 128kbps so we can end up with an effective rate in
 kbps, compared to the Ethernet that is typically deployed at 100Mbps but
 could run faster. Control loops are operated 2 to 3 orders of magnitude
 faster on Ethernet. These are really different worlds and different
 applications, but a determiitsic Ethernet backbone may be use to federate
 a 6TiSCH network.

 Explain in the Introduction (if I have this right) that the 6tisch
 architecture uses route computation to allocate and schedule cells to IPv6
 packets.
 > Unsure of the expected wording. We have routing and sceduling. In the
 Neighbor-to-Neighbor scheduling case, (SF0) Routing will cause traffic to
 follow certain routes, and dynamic scheduling will adapt the number of
 time slots. In the Remote Monitoring and Schedule Management case, the PCE
 is aware of a flows and creates a Track with timeslots that can serve
 those flows.


 Rather than go into detail, for example, about using routing protocols to
 distribute ND registrations, explain that the multi-link subnet
 architecture requires extensions to NDP because not all hosts in a subnet
 can communicate with each other directly.
 > added:
          6TiSCH nodes are not necessarily reachable from one another at
 Layer-2
          and an LLN may span over multiple links. This effectively forms
 an
          homogeneous non-broadcast multi-access (NBMA) subnet, which is
 beyond
          the scope of existing IPv6 ND methods. Extensions to IPv6 ND have
 to be
          introduced.


 I can't find the term "mote" anywhere else in the document, nor is it a
 widely used term, so the parenthetical "(also called motes)" is unneeded.
 > no more mote


 I think the reference to 6tisch-terminology should come first in section
 2.  It took me a while to discover the importance of that document in
 understanding this architecture document.
 > done




 The citation of "Multi-link Subnet Support in IPv6" [I-D.ietf-ipv6
 -multilink-subnets] in the terminology section seems inappropriate, as the
 document expired 13 years ago and the concept was explicitly deprecated in
 RFC 4903.
 > removed that reference; that was a kudos to the original work which may
 not work in general but can still find applicability such as here.



 The overview in section 4 is helpful but provides some redundant details
 and leaves out some others.  In particular, what are the roles of the PCE
 and NME, and what communication is required among them and the various
 forwarding nodes to complete the schedule computation and distribute the
 schedules?  What are the architectural components of route computation and
 update?
 > This is being refined. The abstract components are not preented in more
 details in section “4.4.3.  Remote Monitoring and Schedule Management”


 It would help the reader understand the motivation for the multi-volume
 architecture to move the first paragraph of section 5.1 to the
 Introduction.
 > Abandonned the multi volume approach

 Can sections 3, 4 and 5 be merged?  They all appear to explain aspects of
 an overview of the architecture.
 > done


 Thanks a lot Ralph!


 Pascal

-- 
--------------------------------+---------------------------------
 Reporter:  [email protected]  |       Owner:  [email protected]
     Type:  defect              |      Status:  assigned
 Priority:  major               |   Milestone:  milestone1
Component:  architecture        |     Version:  1.0
 Severity:  Active WG Document  |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                      |
--------------------------------+---------------------------------

Ticket URL: <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/6tisch/trac/ticket/39#comment:2>
6tisch <http://tools.ietf.org/6tisch/>
IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e

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