IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan) Internet Drafts

      
 SCHC over Sigfox LPWAN
 
 draft-ietf-lpwan-schc-over-sigfox-23.txt
 Date: 05/02/2023
 Authors: Juan Zuniga, Carles Gomez, Sergio Aguilar, Laurent Toutain, Sandra Cespedes, Diego Torre, Julien Boite
 Working Group: IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan)
 Formats: html txt xml
The Static Context Header Compression and fragmentation (SCHC) specification (RFC8724) describes a generic framework for application header compression and fragmentation modes designed for Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies. The present document defines a profile of SCHC over Sigfox LPWAN, and provides optimal parameter values and modes of operation.
 SCHC Compound ACK
 
 draft-ietf-lpwan-schc-compound-ack-17.txt
 Date: 04/04/2023
 Authors: Juan Zuniga, Carles Gomez, Sergio Aguilar, Laurent Toutain, Sandra Cespedes, Diego Torre
 Working Group: IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan)
 Formats: html xml txt
The present document updates the SCHC (Static Context Header Compression and fragmentation) protocol RFC8724 and the corresponding Yang Module RFC9363. It defines a SCHC Compound ACK message format and procedure, which are intended to reduce the number of response transmissions (i.e., SCHC ACKs) in the ACK-on-Error mode, by accumulating bitmaps of several windows in a single SCHC message (i.e., the SCHC Compound ACK). Both message format and procedure are generic, so they can be used, for instance, by any of the four Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) technologies defined in RFC8376, being Sigfox, LoRaWAN, NB- IoT and IEEE 802.15.4w.

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IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan)

WG Name IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks
Acronym lpwan
Area Internet Area (int)
State Active
Charter charter-ietf-lpwan-03 Approved
Document dependencies
Additional resources Issue tracker, Wiki, Zulip stream
Personnel Chairs Alexander Pelov, Pascal Thubert
Area Director Éric Vyncke
Delegates Carles Gomez, Laurent Toutain
Mailing list Address lp-wan@ietf.org
To subscribe https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/lp-wan
Archive https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/lp-wan/
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/lpwan

Charter for Working Group

A new generation of wireless technologies has emerged under the generic name of Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA), with a number of common characteristics, which make these technologies unique and disruptive for Internet of Things applications.

Those common traits include an optimized radio modulation, a star topology, frame sizes in the order of tens of bytes transmitted a few times per day at ultra-low speeds and sometimes variable MTUs, and, though downstream may be supported, a mostly upstream transmission pattern that allows the devices to spend most of their time in low- energy deep-sleep mode.

This enables a range of several kilometers and a long battery lifetime, possibly ten years operating on a single coin-cell. This also enables simple and scalable deployments with low-cost devices and thin infrastructures.

Those benefits come at a price: the layer 2 frame formats are optimized and specific to each individual technology. There is no network layer and the application is often hard wired to the layer 2 frame format, leading to siloed deployments that must be managed, secured and operated individually. Migrating from one LPWA technology to another implies rebuilding the whole chain.

There is a need to allow an integration of different LPWAN technologies in order to couple them with their related ecosystems. This will guarantee the inter-working by introducing a network layer, and enable common components for management and security, as well as shared application profiles. The IETF can contribute by providing IPv6 connectivity, and propose technologies to secure the operations and manage the devices and their gateways.

The Working Group will focus on enabling IPv6 connectivity over the following selection of Low-Power Wide-Area technologies: SIGFOX, LoRa, WI-SUN and NB-IOT. These technologies will be used as the baseline technologies for future work.

These technologies present similar characteristics of rare and widely unbalanced over-the-air transmissions, with little capability to alter the frame formats to accommodate this work, which makes it so that existing IETF work (6lo) cannot be trivially applied.

The Working Group will leverage cross-participation with the associated set of stakeholders, including users and SDOs working on the baseline technologies, to ensure that the work taking place corresponds to real demands and that the proposed solutions are indeed applicable.

The group has produced documents providing an overview of the baseline LPWA technologies (RFC8376) as well as a document specifying a Generic Framework for Static Context Header Compression and Fragmentation (SCHC), which provides both a header compression mechanism and an optional fragmentation mechanism (RFC8724). The group will continue to produce new standards track work to optimize IPv6-based communications to the end devices.

The group will:

  1. Perform SCHC Maintenance, including enabling SCHC mechanisms for Upper layer Protocols.

  2. Produce Standard Track documents to apply SCHC IPv6/UDP over the baseline technologies.

  3. Produce a Standards Track document to define the generic data models to formalize the compression and fragmentation contexts for LPWANs.

  4. Produce a Standards Track document to enable  operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) to the LPWAN device, including support for delayed or proxied liveness verification (Ping).

Milestones

Date Milestone Associated documents
Dec 2022 Produce a Standards Track document to enable operations, administration and maintenance (OAM) to the LPWAN device, including support for delayed or proxied liveness verification (Ping)
Feb 2022 Produce a Standards Track document for SCHC over NBIOT draft-ietf-lpwan-schc-over-nbiot
Oct 2021 Produce a Standards Track document for SCHC over SigFox draft-ietf-lpwan-schc-over-sigfox
Feb 2021 Produce a Standards Track document to define the generic data models to formalize the compression and fragmentation contexts for LPWANs
Dec 2020 Produce Standard Track documents to apply SCHC IPv6/UDP over the baseline technologies
May 2020 Perform SCHC Maintenance, including enabling SCHC mechanisms for Upper layer Protocols