Re: Reducing the battery impact of ND

[Lorenzo Colitti <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Erik Nordmark <[e-mail]> wrote:

> The approach you advocate is insufficient to ensure better robustness for
> at least two reasons:
>   - the lifetime(s) of the prefixes are independent of the lifetimes of
> the default routers. Hence in this approach a host can have default routers
> but no prefixes.
>

This can be tricky to implement, but in principle, the host has this
information already.


>  - the reachability state in the NCEs is independent of the default router
> list - per RFC 4861 the router stays in the default router list even if it
> is unreachable. Thus your last router might be unreachable but with
> remaining lifetime - it was the next-to-last router in the list that was
> reachable.
>
> Solving those without risking hosts sending lots of RSs during failure
> events or resulting in a steady state of RSs from hosts seems tricky.


I agree that there are a lot of corner cases here.


> Changing from periodic RAs to (effectively) periodic RSs as you propose
> would change RFC 4861 is a very fundamental way.
>
> It may or may not be the right thing to do for the future, but I think
> that requires a bit more work then forcing some edits into a document which
> has almost completed the WG process. I think resilient-rs has significant
> benefits in its current form and scope.
>

Fair enough. That said - if that's what we want to do, then resilient-rs
should make it clear that it is only for initial solicitations and thus
does not specify or allow behaviour on multicast-capable links where there
are no periodic multicast RAs, because the IPv6 standards as written do not
work on such links.