A new IETF WG has been formed in the Internet Area. For additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the WG Chairs. IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Current status: Proposed WG Chairs: Alexander Pelov <a@ackl.io> Pascal Thubert <pthubert@cisco.com> Assigned Area Director: Suresh Krishnan <suresh.krishnan@ericsson.com> Internet Area Directors: Terry Manderson <terry.manderson@icann.org> Suresh Krishnan <suresh.krishnan@ericsson.com> 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/ Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-lpwan/ 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. To unleash the full power of LPWA technologies and their ecosystems, there is a need to couple them with other ecosystems that 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 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 to ensure that the work taking place corresponds to real demands and that the proposed solutions are indeed applicable. The group will produce informational work describing LPWA technologies and their needs as well as new standard work to optimize IPv6-based communications to the end device The group will: 1. Produce an Informational document describing and relating some selected LPWA technologies. This work will document the common characteristics and highlight actual needs that the IETF could serve; but it is not intended to provide a competitive analysis. It is expected that the information contained therein originates from and is reviewed by people who work on the respective LPWA technologies. 2. Produce a Standards Track document to enable the compression and fragmentation of a CoAP/UDP/IPv6 packet over LPWA networks. This will be achieved through stateful mechanisms, specifically designed for star topology and severely constrained links. The work will include the definition of generic data models to describe the compression and fragmentation contexts. This work may also include to define technology- specific adaptations of the generic compression/fragmentation mechanism wherever necessary. Milestones: Nov 2016 - Adopt LPWAN specifications as WG item Dec 2016 - Adopt IP/UDP compression and fragmentation mechanism as a WG item Jan 2017 - Adopt CoAP compression mechanism as a WG item Apr 2017 - Submit LPWAN specification to the IESG for publication as an Informational Document May 2017 - Submit IP/UDP compression and fragmentation mechanism to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard Jul 2017 - Submit CoAP compression mechanism to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard
