Subject: [Capwap] CAPWAP and RFID

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:44:12 -0400

Hi All,

For background on why I'm raising the next few issues, please see the  
slides (in the proceedings for IETF 66) that I did not get a chance  
to present in the WG meeting.  The primary point of those slides was  
that the Reader Operations WG of the EPCglobal standards body (an  
RFID industry standards body) is considering reusing the base  
protocol portions of CAPWAP as a discovery and control protocol for  
RFID systems.  Bob O'Hara and I are both active in that group, and  
we've been asked to communicate some requirements from that group to  
the CAPWAP WG.

NOTE:  We are not talking about adding RFID-specific control messages  
to CAPWAP.  In fact, the group is not currently planning to use  
CAPWAP as the control channel.  So, these are not RFID-specific  
requirements.

In our scenario, an RFID controller (or "client") would act in the  
role of a WTP, and RFID readers would act in the AP role.

The two requirements we've been asked to communicate are:

(1) Trickle firmware download with separate reboot.  In other words,  
we need to be able to download the firmware while our CAPWAP  
connection remains in the running state, and later be able to trigger  
a reboot, which will result in a switch to the new firmware.  It  
seems very likely that some 802.11 systems will require this feature,  
as well.  In fact, it is my understanding that some systems already  
do it this way.  But, the current state diagram and CAPWAP text don't  
seem to support this -- you leave the running state to move to the  
firmware download state and can only exit the firmware download state  
through the reboot state.

(2) Clean separation between CAPWAP "base" protocol and 802.11- 
specific control messages.  Ideally, we'd like to see the CAPWAP base  
protocol and the 802.11-specific controls in separate documents, but  
it would also be possible for us to reference a portion of a  
monolithic document, as long as the base protocol is cleanly-enough  
separated from the 802.11-specific portions to allow us to  
unambiguously and normatively reference the base protocol.

Would the CAPWAP WG support making these changes so that the  
EPCglobal RO WG can reuse this technology?

Thanks,
Margaret

Margaret Wasserman
Vice President
ThingMagic
[email-masked]
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From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:07:36 -0400

I made an error in my earlier post that I would like to correct:

> protocol portions of CAPWAP as a discovery and control protocol for

s/discovery and control/discovery and configuration

As I said in the next paragraph, we are not currently planning to use  
CAPWAP as a control protocol for RFID.

Sorry for any confusion.

Margaret