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

From: IESG Secretary <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 07:39:27 -0800 (PST)

A modified charter has been submitted for the Routing Over Low power and
Lossy networks working group in the Routing Area of the IETF.  The IESG
has not made any determination as yet.  The modified charter is provided
below for informational purposes only.  Please send your comments to the
IESG mailing list ([email-masked]) by Wednesday, March 11, 2009.

Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (roll)
==================================================
Last Modified: 2009-02-04

Current Status: Active Working Group

Additional information is available at tools.ietf.org/wg/roll 

Chair(s):

JP Vasseur <[email-masked]> 
David Culler <[email-masked]> 

Routing Area Director(s):

Ross Callon <[email-masked]> 
David Ward <[email-masked]> 

Routing Area Advisor:
David Ward <[email-masked]> 

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion: [email-masked]
To Subscribe: http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/roll
Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/roll/

Description of Working Group:

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. 
As shown in a protocol survey existing routing protocols (in their current
 
form) such as OSPF, IS-IS, AODV, and OLSR, do not meet 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, healthcare, 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 
will be 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.

Work Items:

- 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 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.

- Protocol work: In light of the application specific routing
requirements, the 
  Working Group will either specify a new protocol and/or will select an
existing 
  routing protocol (with the appropriate extensions in cooperation with
the 
  relevant Working Group).

- Documentation of applicability statement of ROLL routing protocols.

Goals and Milestones:

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

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

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

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

July 2009 Submit Routing metrics for LLNs document to the IESG to be
considered as a Proposed Standard.

Feb 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.

July 2009  Submit first draft of ROLL routing protocol specification as
Proposed Standard.

Nov 2009   Submit first draft of the MIB module of the ROLL routing
protocol specification.

Feb 2010   Submit the ROLL routing protocol specification to the IESG as
Proposed Standard.

March 2010 Submit the MIB module of the ROLL routing protocol
specification to the IESG as Proposed Standard.

April 2010 Evaluate WG progress, recharter or close.