Re: [manet] Reactive Protocol Situation

[Philip Levis <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 1, 2012, at 9:27 AM, Dearlove, Christopher (UK) wrote:

> They can be good evidence of the failure of protocols ;)
> 
> But what is clear to me is that one important issue (and another of my posts is attempting to both be more precise, as well as going elsewhere) is the handling of unidirectional links. So any good evidence needs to consider those.

Since communication in wireless is rarely binary, I think the more common term is asymmetric links. I'm confused; I don't believe that unit disc models capture asymmetric links. Is the implied statement that RPL doesn't properly handle asymmetric links but LOADng does? I think this came up in draft-clausen-lln-rpl-experiences and there was some discussion on the ROLL list about it. The neighbor set in RPL is defined in 8.2.1:

"First, the candidate neighbor set is a subset of the nodes that can be reached via link-local multicast."

then in DIO processing (8.2.3.1) it reads:

"As DIO messages are received from candidate neighbors, the neighbors may be promoted to DODAG parents by following the rules of DODAG discovery as described in Section 8.2."

I want to be clear here; I haven't read deeply about LOADng, thought about it much, or experimented with it at all. So I have zero to say about LOADng's strengths and weaknesses. 

But just because somebody publishes (and republishes) a draft saying something doesn't mean it's true. There are, in my opinion, some very valid points in draft-clausen-lln-rpl-experiences that relate to fundamental design decisions in RPL. For example, I think that the issues raised about the state requirements of floating DODAGs and RPL message fragmentation are valid and reasonable and something we need to look at. 

However, there are others that are the result of naive mistakes anyone can make when implementing any wireless routing protocol, such as link asymmetry and protocol convergence. Unfortunately the draft doesn't distinguish the two. Implementing a protocol poorly then saying it doesn't work isn't particularly meaningful. As I said in Paris, I thought the draft is valuable because it outlines many of the basic mistakes one makes the first time you try implementing a wireless routing protocol.

Phil