I attended the 75th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Stockholm last week. Here is some of the latest news from IETF activities related to the Internet of Things:
6LoWPAN - The 6lowpan working group is currently moving four Internet-Drafts towards last call in the standards track (Improved Header Compression, 6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery) and informational track (Use Cases, Routing Requirements). I presented the latest ND draft, which has good consensus and will be going through a round of technical improvements within 2 weeks. Next the WG is looking to re-charter to continue on subjects such as security, MIBs etc.
ROLL – The roll working group presented the RPL (pronounced “ripple”) routing protocol draft, which has been accepted as an official working group document today. This will be the basis for routing over low-power and lossy networks including 6LoWPAN, which still needs lots of contribution to reach a full solution.
New 6lowapp effort - We held a very successful meeting about applications in resource-constrained networks. About 60-70 people attended presentations from Carsten Bormann, Don Sturek (from Pacific Gas & Electric and ZigBee/IP) along with a set of 2-minute stand-ups. The presentation is available here. The feedback from IETF Area Directors was that there is obvious support, motivation and requirements (and that we are in a hurry) – so start working! A 6lowapp mailing list and wiki page will be coming soon, keep tuned.
There was a great presence at the IETF from IPSO members, who held several meetings during the same week. Thanks to the move of ZigBee and the energy industry towards all-IP smart energy we say many new participants in Stockholm. It is really positive to see the collaboration between the IETF, IPSO, ZigBee and Utilities in this area.
August 4, 2009 at 06:26
6LowApp mailing list is as follows:
http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/6lowapp
August 4, 2009 at 09:13
Thanks Hamid, yep – this new list went on-line last night. You can also find a wiki page here on 6lowapp:
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/app/trac/wiki/6LowApp
September 16, 2009 at 20:01
Hi Zach,
how does chopan (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-frank-6lowpan-chopan-00) play into the 6lowpan efforts? It appears that draft was submitted about three weeks prior to the submission of 6lowpan-usecases
I was really surprised to see a proposal to give up the ‘end-to-end’ principle. It’s clear that an intermediary service is needed but isn’t that entirely orthogonal to the network!?
Cheerio, Harry.
September 16, 2009 at 22:40
Harry,
Chopan is not within the scope of IETF 6lowpan – which is working on networking related issues. It fits more into the new 6lowapp standardization effort we are starting right now, and the draft was contributed there as well.
True, breaking end-to-end semantics by compressing HTTP at a proxy has some problems. This is one way of trying to solve the problem at hand. The reality is that HTTP/TCP as is won’t do it over 6lowpan and for minimal embedded devices even just from the overhead perspective. This is one of the goals of the 6lowapp effort – to develop a solution for embedded low-power application data transfer. At least there is tons we can learn from REST/URL/Web models when doing that.
I guess your comment is that we should preserve the end-to-end paradigm as much as possible, right?