[dtn] DTN neighbor discovery

[Brian Sipos <[e-mail]>]

Ronald,
As a follow-on to the interest in advancing IRTF IPND [1] to an IETF document, I was looking at this earlier and think it would be beneficial to separate the concerns of:

  1.  The neighbor messaging payload with discovery information
  2.  Framing of the payload with security (e.g., source signing), data lifetime, etc.
  3.  The transport of that packet via broadcast, multicast, or even unicast

If layer #2 is performed by BPv7, then BPSec provides security and #3 can be done with a BP convergence layer. This gives a huge benefit that all of the mechanisms of BP, BPSec, and CLs can be leveraged. It also avoids needing a separate UDP port or broadcast address assignment for DTN neighbor messaging and allows the neighbor messaging to apply to IP and any other network type usable by BP.

I have a very rough draft of layer #1 in a public repository [2], nothing in there is settled at this point other than "it uses BPv7 as framing/security and UDPCL for transport" so it's not submitted as an actual I-D. Let me know what you think about this. If it's worth progressing you're welcome to comment and/or contribute to the draft.

Thanks,
Brian S.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-irtf-dtnrg-ipnd-03
[2] https://briansipos.github.io/dtn-neighbor-msg/draft-sipos-dtn-neighbor-msg.html