Hello Mark :

>The majority of IP-based home networks today are neither power-constrained nor 
>particularly lossy. So, while we can certainly learn from LLN requirements 
>analysis, I do think the base requirements in homenet could turn out to be 
>quite different, or at least a smaller and slightly different subset, of the 
>overall LLN requirements. 

> Certainly, home networks have an emerging IP-based "low power and lossy" 
> component in them. One could even argue that it will become dominant at some 
> time in the future, but that's a leap I personally would be pretty 
> uncomfortable in the group making without some very strong data to back it up.


In any case we have to consider the integration of the LLN (e.g. a Command and 
Control) component of the network within the HOMENET architecture, wouldn't you 
think? If so, there is a probably a RPL piece to the story, and the question 
becomes how that piece integrates with the rest of the architecture. We 
probably want to obtain a converged network, and probably would prefer to avoid 
running too many routing protocols, with redistribution policies etc... which 
can rapidly become nasty in terms of administration.

Anyway, I'd suggest that whether the home network is fully an LLN or not is not 
necessarily the core if the RPL applicability discussion:

* ROLL did not produce a routing protocol that is limited to LLNs, but a 
routing protocol that is acceptable for LLNs. IOW it is not restricted to LLNs, 
by far.

* RPL is designed to be simple to deploy. It inherits from mesh technologies 
the traditional self-* properties which make it quite autonomic thus better fit 
for unmanaged environments.

* RPL is designed and optimized for edge (stub) networks, with one or multiple 
gateway. Just like L2 mesh networks, RPL builds multilink nets and/or subnets 
that are oriented towards the gateways. It is possible to optimize traffic 
from/to certain destinations within the network, but the general goal is NOT 
any to any optimization. As a result, it can be desirable to have a non-RPL 
high speed backbone that can be a single backbone link or that can be a more 
complex IPv6 backbone network running, say, a link state protocol, when that's 
really needed.

* Associated to the support of multiple gateways, RPL incorporates natively the 
concept of multiple routing topologies, for instance if you want to separate a 
metering network that reports to some utility with your voice and video 
network. This comes with 6MAN drafts that enable to tag the packets so as to 
follow the appropriate topology.

* Finally, the brains for the routing decision is a plug in, called an 
objective function (OF). So even if HOMENET inherits from ROLL for the DV loop 
avoidance scheme and from 6MAN for the tagging/forwarding, the WG can still 
define one or more OFs that will dictate the shape of the resulting routing 
topologies. The OF is the decision maker that will, say, prefer a high speed 
Ethernet over an LLN, for a given class of traffic.

What do you think?

Pascal
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