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

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

The Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (roll) working group in the
Routing Area of the IETF is undergoing rechartering. The IESG has not
made any determination yet. The following draft charter was submitted,
and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your
comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by 2015-04-20.

Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (roll)
------------------------------------------------
Current Status: Active WG

Chairs:
  Ines Robles <[e-mail]>
  Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>

Technical advisors:
  Rene Struik <[e-mail]>

Assigned Area Director:
  Alvaro Retana <[e-mail]>

Mailing list
  Address: [e-mail]
  To Subscribe: http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/roll
  Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/roll/

Charter:

Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) are made up of many embedded devices
with limited power, memory, and processing resources. They are
interconnected by a variety of links, such as IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth,
Low Power WiFi, wired or other low power PLC (Powerline Communication)
links. 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.

Generally speaking, LLNs have at least five distinguishing
characteristics:

LLNs operate with a hard, very small bound on state.  In most cases, LLN
optimize for saving energy.  Typical traffic patterns are not simply
unicast flows (e.g. in some cases most if not all traffic can be point to
multipoint). In most cases, LLNs will be employed over link layers with
restricted frame-sizes, thus a routing protocol for LLNs should be
specifically adapted for such link layers.  LLN routing protocols have to
be very careful when trading off efficiency for generality; many LLN
nodes do not have resources to waste.

These specific properties cause LLNs to have specific routing
requirements.

Existing routing protocols such as OSPF, IS-IS, AODV, and OLSR have been
evaluated by the working group and have in their current form been found
to not satisfy all of these specific routing requirements.

The Working Group is focused on routing issues for LLN.

There is a wide scope of application areas for LLNs, including industrial
monitoring, building automation (HVAC, lighting, access control, fire),
connected homes, health care, environmental monitoring, urban sensor
networks (e.g. Smart Grid), asset tracking. The Working Group focuses on
routing solutions for a subset of these: industrial, connected home,
building and urban sensor networks for which routing requirements have
been specified. These application-specific routing requirement documents
were used for protocol design.

The Working Group focuses only on IPv6 routing architectural framework
for these application scenarios. 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 pay particular attention to routing security and
manageability (e.g., self routing 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 upper-layer applications utilizing LLNs define appropriate
mechanisms. The solution must include unicast and multicast
considerations.

The Working Group will document how non-control packets are routed when
they cross the LLN, and when they enter and exit the LLN: the appropriate
use of RH3 (RFC6553), RPI (RFC6554) and IPv6-in-IPv6 encapsulation
including how routing loops are detected. In consultation with the 6lo
WG, the Working Group will design a method to compress these routing
headers into a single block.  The WGLC on this work will be shared with
6lo.

ROLL is responsible for maintenance of the protocols that is has
developed, including RPL and MPL.  AD approval is required for each new
work item that is proposed.

Work Items:

- Details about when to use RFC6553, RFC6554, and IPv6-in-IPv6
encapsulation.

- Details about how to compress RFC6553, RFC6554, and IP headers in the
6LoWPAN
adaptation layer context

Milestones:

TBD