Re: [6tisch] SF0 - Cell reclamation by RPL parent

["Prof. Diego Dujovne" <[e-mail]>]

Anand,
           Let me comment inline below.
Regards,

                              Diego

2016-03-07 7:36 GMT-03:00 S.V.R.Anand <[e-mail]>:

> Hi Diego and others,
>
> Since we are discussing about the message transactions in SF0, this mail
> is with
> respect to the RPL parent, the cell donor.
>
> There are situations where the RPL parent might want to apply a cell
> reclamation
> and, depending on the context, a reallocation policy dynamically. This
> results in one or more cells that
> have been given to its children are reclaimed by the RPL parent due to
> various
> reasons as below.
>
> - The child node is out of the network, or child and parent cannot reach
> each other,
>   after the 6P add cell transaction is complete, thereby delete cell
> operation is not
>   being transacted. Cell reclamation helps in "cell garbage" collection.
>
>
I was thinking on the neighbour list management. If a neighbour is deleted,
all the cells
belonging to the link with that neighbour shall be deleted too. Is there a
specification on
which entity maintains the neighbour list?



> - As add cell requests arrive asynchronously from its children, an RPL
>   parent implementing certain fairness objective might re-appropriate the
> cells
>   that have already alloted its children, especially during a resource
> crunch.
>

Bandwidth requests are managed by SFs; an SF running on a Parent can
trigger
a deletion event as needed. The starving applications on the top layer
should
react accordingly. The problem here is that the SFs react given certain
statistics
and events, but there is no current connection with other modules which may
reclaim cells.
This raises another point: The cell list should be kept and maintained at
the
6P level, or at the SF? Do we allow for multiple SFs on the same node?
Do we allow only different SFs in a per-neighbour basis (so each link is
managed
by only one SF)?


>
> - Referring to the following text in 4.2.5 of the 6tisch architecture
> document,
>
>   "...Note that a PCE is expected to have precedence in the allocation, so
> that  an RPL parent
>     would only be able to obtain portions that are not in-use by the PCE."
>
>   It may be that, an RPL parent might have to relinquish its own cells if
>    needed by PCE any time. In such a scenario, the RPL parent may be
> forced to
>   reclaim the cells given to its children.
>
> While the first case is relatively less complex, the latter two cases are
> problematic as these cases can lead to (i) potential race conditions, say
> between PCE and SF0 operations, and (ii) a cascading effect across several
> RPL
> parents down the DODAG. Currently, there is no mechanism defined to address
> this problem.
>
> I suppose the above text extends beyond SF0.
>

As far as I know, we are using chunks allocated to the RPL Parents by the
PCE to
schedule cells requested by SFs. The main assumption here is that the PCE
will
distribute chunks among the RPL Parents and not reclaim them back. However,
it is only an assumption. As I noticed above, cell list maintenance should
be transferred
to 6P if another module can add/delete cells concurrently.



>
> In light of the above use cases and the associated problems, do you think
> it is a
> good idea to include an appropriate message in SF0 for reclaiming the
> cells by
> the RPL parent ? or are we inviting new set of problems by doing so ?
>
>
My question here is: Who is going to send this message? RPL? PCE through
CoAP?
Can we leave this to Chunk negotiation, which is currently out of scope of
this draft?



> Will be happy to receive your inputs.
>
> Anand
>
>
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>


-- 
DIEGO DUJOVNE
Académico Escuela de Ingeniería en Informática y Telecomunicaciones
Facultad de Ingeniería UDP
www.ingenieria.udp.cl
(56 2) 676 8125