Subject: [lp-wan] Proposed charter v3

From: "Pascal Thubert (pthubert)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2016 15:39:15 +0000

6LPWA: "IPv6 over Low-Power Wide-Area networks".

Background/Introduction:
------------------------

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 over a simple star
topology, frame sizes in the order of tens of bytes transmitted a few times per
day, and, though downstream may be emerging as an equally massive opportunity, a
transmission pattern which is generally upstream and allows the devices to stay
longer in low-energy deep-sleep mode.

This enables a range in tens of kilometers, and a long battery lifetime, with up
to ten years of operation 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 MAC-layer formats are optimized and specific
to each individual technology. There is no network layer and the application is
often hard wired to the MAC, 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
at the network layer and enable common components for management and security,
as well as shared application profiles. The IETF can contribute by enabling IPv6
connectivity to the devices, and propose technologies to secure the operations
and manage the devices and their gateways.

Description of Working Group:
-----------------------------

The Working Group will focus on enabling IPv6 connectivity over a selection of
Low-Power Wide-Area technologies, <tech1>, <Tech2> and <Tech3>.

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, for IETF consumption, describing LPWA
technologies and their needs, best practice documents on using IETF technologies
in LPWA networks directed to the selected entities, and new standard track work
to optimize IPv6-based communications to the end device, down to the remote-I/O
model where the device itself is not fully aware of the whole stack.

The WG will interface with other appropriate groups in the IETF Internet Area,
Operations and Management Area, and Security Area.

Work Items:
-----------

The group will:

1. Produce an Informational document describing and relating existing some LPWA
technologies. This work will document the common characteristics and highlights
actual needs that the IETF could serve; but it is not an intention to provide a
competitive analysis. It is expected that the information contained therein
originates from and is reviewed by LPWA stakeholders, and that this WG may
leverage the resulting document to suggest new activity in other WGs.

2. Produce best practice documents for security and management, highlighting
potential areas where IETF technologies may be leveraged; these documents may
eventually be published as Informational RFCs. It is an expectation that the
resulting document(s) may contribute to the interaction with LPWA stakeholders
and lead to additional work in the future.

3. Produce Standard Track documents to enable the compression of a CoAP/UDP/IPv6
packet over LPWA. Considering the extreme constraints, the work will focus on a
generic YANG data model to describe the compression, and protocols to install
the related state at the compression end-points; the work will also include, for
the selected technologies, specific Standard Track documents to describe how the
fields relevant to the decompression are encoded over the air, if any.

4. Produce a document to enable the fragmentation of larger packets over LPWA,
either as a Best Practice leveraging existing technology, or as new Standard
Track document if that is deemed necessary.