The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Industrial Routing Requirements in Low Power and Lossy Networks ' <draft-ietf-roll-indus-routing-reqs-06.txt> as an Informational RFC This document is the product of the Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Adrian Farrel and Ross Callon. A URL of this Internet-Draft is: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-roll-indus-routing-reqs-06.txt Technical Summary Wireless, low power field devices enable industrial users to significantly increase the amount of information collected and the number of control points that can be remotely managed. The deployment of these wireless devices will significantly improve the productivity and safety of the plants while increasing the efficiency of the plant workers by extending the information set available from wired systems. In an industrial environment, low power, high reliability, and easy installation and maintenance are mandatory qualities for wireless devices. The aim of this document is to analyze the requirements for the routing protocol used for Low power and Lossy Networks (LLN) in industrial environments. IPv6 is perceived as a key technology to provide the scalability and interoperability that are required in that space and is being more and more present in standards and products under development and early deployments. Cable is perceived as a more proven, safer techhnology, and existing, operational deployments are very stable in time. For these reasons, it is not expected that wireless will replace wire in any foreseeable future; the consensus in the industrial space is rather that wireless will tremendously augment the scope and benefits of automation by enabling the control of devices that were not connected in the past for reasons of cost and/or deployment complexities. But for LLN to be adopted in the industrial environment, the wireless network needs to have three qualities: low power, high reliability, and easy installation and maintenance. The routing protocol used for low power and lossy networks (LLN) is important to fulfilling these goals. Industrial automation is segmented into two distinct application spaces, known as "process" or "process control" and "discrete manufacturing" or "factory automation". In industrial process control, the product is typically a fluid (oil, gas, chemicals ...). In factory automation or discrete manufacturing, the products are individual elements (screws, cars, dolls). While there is some overlap of products and systems between these two segments, they are surprisingly separate communities. The specifications targeting industrial process control tend to have more tolerance for network latency than what is needed for factory automation. Irrespective of this different 'process' and 'discrete' plant nature both plant types will have similar needs for automating the collection of data that used to be collected manually, or was not collected before. Examples are wireless sensors that report the state of a fuse, report the state of a luminary, HVAC status, report vibration levels on pumps, report man-down, and so on. Other novel application arenas that equally apply to both 'process' and 'discrete' involve mobile sensors that roam in and out of plants, such as active sensor tags on containers or vehicles. Some if not all of these applications will need to be served by the same low power and lossy wireless network technology. This may mean several disconnected, autonomous LLN networks connecting to multiple hosts, but sharing the same ether. Interconnecting such networks, if only to supervise channel and priority allocations, or to fully synchronize, or to share path capacity within a set of physical network components may be desired, or may not be desired for practical reasons, such as e.g. cyber security concerns in relation to plant safety and integrity. All application spaces desire battery operated networks of hundreds of sensors and actuators communicating with LLN access points. In an oil refinery, the total number of devices might exceed one million, but the devices will be clustered into smaller networks that in most cases interconnect and report to an existing plant network infrastructure. Working Group Summary No controversy. Document Quality The I-D is informational and specifies IPv6 routing requirements. Personnel Who is the Document Shepherd for this document? JP Vasseur (jvasseur@cisco.com) Who is the Responsible Area Director? Adrian Farrel (adrian.farrel@huawei.com) _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
