Re: Reducing the battery impact of ND

[Lorenzo Colitti <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 9:20 AM, Erik Nordmark <[e-mail]> wrote:

> One of your "yes please" below is a change to ND - Andrew's b) about
> restarting RS would require a (small) standards update.
>

We should try to get that into draft-6man-resilient-rs.


> And if you work out the details on b) I suspect you'll find that to
> completely avoid the periodic multicast RAs the routers need to know
> whether hosts expect periodic RA as opposed to all the hosts doing the RS
> restart. That would imply some more protocol change.
>

You don't need to avoid them. You just need to make them infrequent enough
that they are not a substantial cause of power drain. I know from solid
data that on a device like a mobile phone on a wifi network, an RA every 30
minutes is *way* down in the noise in terms of power consumption. (While
"one RA every 3 seconds because the router sends a multicast RS to everyone
every time a device joins the network" *does* have an impact).


> And just to be perfectly clear, I don't think assuming (near) perfect MLD
> snooping including in WiFi APs is undesirable. Hence my focus has been to
> remove as much as possible of the ND multicasts including the DAD and NS
> packets.
>

You don't need to do the snooping on the APs. You can do it on the client
side, in the wifi firmware. The power savings between "received but
filtered out in wifi firmware" and "received, passed to the main processor
and ignored" are substantial; again, for a mobile phone on wifi, we have
data on this.

But my overall observation is that if we think we can fix (even a subset
> of) this without a standards update, then we are just fooling ourselves.
>

It depends what sort of device you're talking about. If you're talking
about a mobile phone, then we can fix it for sure. If you're talking about
a sensor whose battery needs to last for months, then maybe not. But that's
what we have 6LowPAN for.

Cheers,
Lorenzo