The general internet community needs to be aware of activities in North America that directly relate to the use of IETF protocols in the Electric Utility industry. This activity is generally referred to as the SmartGrid. Though the issues immediately deal with technical and policy decisions in the US and Canada, the SmartGrid concept is gaining significant momentum in Europe and Asia as well. http://www.smartgrids.eu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid#Countries The SmartGrid has many definitions but as a practical matter it is a substantial re-architecture of the data communications networks that utilities use to maintain the stability and reliability of their power grids. Many of the requirements for the SmartGrid in North America came out of the 2003 North East power outage which demonstrated a substantial lack of investment in Utility IT systems. http://www.ferc.gov/EventCalendar/Files/20040915141105-blackout.pdf Of particular note, is the desire by utilities to extend the reach of their communications networks directly to the utility meter and beyond ultimately into the customer premise itself. This is generally referred to as the Advanced Meter Interface (AMI). One of the use cases driving this requirement is the next generation of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The utilities, correctly IMHO, want to precisely control the timing of how these vehicles are recharged so not to create a unique form of DOS attack and take out the grid when everyone goes home at night. This is a principal use case in 6lowpan ( ID below ). Increasingly energy flows are becoming bi-directional creating needs for more computational intelligence and capability at the edge. What is going on? Why should the IETF community care? The United States Government, as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 gave the National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST ) principal responsibility "to coordinate development of a framework that includes protocols and model standards" for the SmartGrid. http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/ After several meetings sponsored by NIST in recent months, NIST released a preliminary report. Several folks from the IETF community attended those meetings, myself included. There multiple troubling stories about how those meetings were organized but I'll leave those tales to others. http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/smartgrid_interoperability.pdf One of the requests from NIST and the SmartGrid community was a list of Core Internet protocols that NIST could refer to. Fred Baker has been working on that task. ( below ) Myself and others are deeply concerned by how this effort is developing. There is no current consensus on what the communications architecture of the SmartGrid is or how IP actually fits into it. The Utility Industry does not understand the current IPv4 number exhaust problem and the consequences of that if they want to put a IP address on every Utility Meter in North America. What is equally troubling is that many of the underlying protocols that utilities wish to deploy are not engineered for IPv6. We have an example of that in a recent ID. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-c1222-transport-over-ip-01.txt Obviously, there are significant CyberSecurity issues in the SmartGrid concept and NIST has produced a useful document outlining the requirements and usecases. http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/nistir-7628/draft-nistir-7628.pdf How the SmartGrid interfaces with or bridges with Home Area or Enterprise Local Area networks is unclear, to put it mildly. I want to use this message to encourage the community to read the attached documents and get involved in this effort as appropriate. Additional NIST documents will be published shortly with a open public comment period. I strongly urge members of the IETF community to participate in this comment period and lend its expertise as necessary. It's useful and important work. ************************ Title : Core Protocols in the Internet Protocol Suite Author(s) : F. Baker Filename : draft-baker-ietf-core-03.txt Pages : 32 Date : 2009-10-03 This note attempts to identify the core of the Internet Protocol Suite. The target audience is NIST, in the Smart Grid discussion, as they have requested guidance on how to profile the Internet Protocol Suite. In general, that would mean selecting what they need from the picture presented here. A URL for this Internet-Draft is: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-baker-ietf-core-03.txt Title : Design and Application Spaces for 6LoWPANs Author(s) : E. Kim, et al. Filename : draft-ietf-6lowpan-usecases-04.txt Pages : 30 Date : 2009-10-01 This document investigates potential application scenarios and use cases for low-power wireless personal area networks (LoWPANs). This document provides dimensions of design space for LoWPAN applications. A list of use cases and market domains that may benefit and motivate the work currently done in the 6LoWPAN WG is provided with the characterisitcis of each dimention. A complete list of practical use cases is not the goal of this document. A URL for this Internet-Draft is: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-6lowpan-usecases-04.txt Richard Shockey PSTN Mobile: +1 703.593.2683 <mailto:richard(at)shockey.us> skype/AIM: rshockey101 LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/rshockey101 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf