WG Review: Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (roll)

[IESG Secretary <[e-mail]>]

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Routing Area.  
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following draft 
charter was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only.  
Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list ([e-mail]) by
January 22nd.

+++

Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (roll)
==================================================

Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Chairs:
TBD

Routing Area Director(s):
Ross Callon <[e-mail]>
David Ward <[e-mail]>


Description of Working Group

Low power and Lossy networks (LLNs) are typically composed of many 
embedded devices with limited power, memory, and processing resources 
interconnected by a variety of links, such as IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth, 
Low Power WiFi. LLNs are transitioning to an end-to-end IP-based solution
to avoid the problem of non-interoperable networks interconnected by 
protocol translation gateways and proxies. In addition, LLNs have specific
 
routing requirements that may not be met by existing routing protocols, 
such as OSPF, IS-IS, AODV and OLSR. For example path selection must be 
designed to take into consideration the specific power capabilities, 
attributes and functional characteristics of the links and nodes in the 
network.

There is a wide scope of application areas for LLNs, including industrial
 
monitoring, building automation (HVAC, lighting, access control, fire), 
connected home, healthcare, environmental monitoring, urban sensor
networks 
sensor networks, assets tracking, refrigeration. The Working Group will 
only focus on routing solutions for a subset of these. It will focus on  
industrial, connected home/building and urban sensor networks and it will
 
determine the routing requirements for these scenarios. 

The Working Group will provide an IPv6 only routing architectural
framework 
for these application scenarios. Given the transition of this technology
at 
this time it is believed that an IPv4 solution is not necessary. The
framework 
will take into consideration various aspects including high reliability in
 
the presence of time varying loss characteristics and connectivity while 
permitting low-power operation with very modest memory and CPU pressure in
 
networks potentially comprising a very large number (several thousands) of
 
nodes. 

The Working Group will explore aspects of mobility within a single LLN
(if any) 
in the routing requirement creation.

The Working Group will pay particular attention to routing security and 
manageability (e.g., self configuration) issues. It will also need to
consider 
the transport characteristic the routing protocol messages will
experience. 
Mechanisms that protect an LLN from congestion collapse or that establish
some 
degree of fairness between concurrent communication sessions are out of
scope of 
the Working Group. It is expected that applications utilizing LLNs define
appropriate mechanisms.

Work Items:
 
- Produce routing requirements documents for Industrial, Connected 
Home, Building and urban sensor networks. Each document will describe the
use 
case and the associated routing protocol requirements. The documents will
progress in collaboration with the 6lowpan Working Group (INT area). 

- Survey the applicability of existing protocols to LLNs. The aim of this
 
document will be to analyze the scaling and characteristics of existing 
protocols and identify whether or not they meet the routing requirements 
of the applications identified above. Existing IGPs, MANET, NEMO, DTN 
routing protocols will be part of evaluation.

- Specification of routing metrics used in path calculation. This
includes 
static and dynamic link/node attributes required for routing in LLNs.

- Provide an architectural framework for routing and path selection at
Layer 3 
(Routing for LLN Architecture) that addresses such issues as whether LLN
routing 
protocols require a distributed and/or centralized path computation
models, 
whether additional hierarchy is necessary and how it is applied.
Manageability 
will be considered with each approach, along with various trade-offs for 
maintaining low power operation, including the presence of non-trivial
loss 
and networks with a very large number of nodes.

- Produce a routing security framework for routing in LLNs.
 
Goals And Milestones:

July 2008 Submit Routing requirements for Industrial applications to the
IESG to be considered as an Informational RFC.

July 2008 Submit Routing requirements for Connected Home networks
applications 
to the IESG to be considered as an Informational RFC.

July 2008 Submit Routing requirements for Building applications to the  
IESG to be considered as an Informational RFC.

July 2008 Submit Routing requirements for Urban networks applications 
to the IESG to be considered as an Informational RFC.

November 2008: Submit Routing metrics for LLNs document to the IESG to be
 
considered as a Proposed Standard.

February 2009: Submit Protocol Survey to the IESG to be considered as 
an Informational RFC.

April 2009: Submit Security Framework to the IESG to be considered as 
an Informational RFC

May 2009: Submit the Routing for LLNs Architecture document to the 
IESG as an Informational RFC.

June 2009: Recharter.

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