On May 25, 2011, at 19:58, Ray Hunter wrote:

> I've just read the RFC covering the (very interesting) mesh under / route 
> over mechanism used in 6LoWPAN 
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6lowpan-nd-16 . Very cool stuff.

Thanks!

> Even there it was a requirement that all nodes taking part in the network 
> behave the same way.
> > The applicability of this specification is limited to LoWPANs where all 
> > nodes on the subnet implement these optimizations in a homogeneous way.

The idea here is that this draft updates RFC 4944 (the IP-over-foo for IEEE 
802.15.4, usually referred to as 6LoWPAN) so that *all* nodes on a 6LoWPAN MUST 
implement 6LoWPAN-ND as opposed to ND-classic.

> So if the point of this draft is really to limit multicast, then from an 
> operational perspective don't you want ALL nodes on a link to avoid using 
> multicast as much as possible?

Yes, that is one of the reasons why we didn't try to tackle the theoretical 
possibility of interoperation between nodes implementing 6LoWPAN-ND and other 
nodes implementing ND-classic on 6LoWPANs, because even listening for multicast 
is very expensive for some nodes there.

> So if the point of this draft is really to avoid operational problems with 
> STP thrashing, then from an operational perspective don't you want ALL nodes 
> on a link to avoid timing out too fast as much as possible?

There is no STP in 6LoWPAN, so that isn't a consideration for this draft.
Again, 6LoWPAN-ND is currently defined for non-Ethernet networks that are 
homogeneously 6LoWPAN-ND, i.e. 802.15.4 (and, most likely once their 
IP-over-foo documents stabilize, similar constrained networks such as BT-LE or 
DECT-ULE), 
However if people want to go ahead and do the work of adapting 6LoWPAN-ND (or 
some of its elements) to other networks,
e.g., Ethernet/WiFi, then one would have to open that can of worms.

Gruesse, Carsten

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