Subject: [lp-wan] Four technologies?

From: "Pascal Thubert (pthubert)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2016 12:59:57 +0000

Dear all :

At the BoF in Argentina, we said we expected to serve 1 to 3 technologies, with the idea that serving more would be trying to boil the ocean.
And now we have LoRa, Wi-Sun (802.15.4g), SIGFOX and NB-IOT. Can we serve them all?

Well, that's certainly something we need to discuss in the ML and agree at the BoF as well.

A hint is this: not all technologies have the same set of issues/needs and we probably would not be serving them all at once for most problems we'll be looking at.
Which boils down to saying that we can be serving 1-3 technologies at a time for a given problem, while serving all 4 of the above over the lifetime of the WG.

If we look at the draft charter, the compression item is already solved for Wi-Sun, and Wi-Sun does not need fragmentation with 802.15.4g PHYs.
Looking at future work that we may envision, NB-IOT already has its scheduling in place and does not need the likes of 6TiSCH for that piece; some techs will want to add support for L3 mesh, some not; AAA may stay very specific and the reuse of IETF tech tailored per technology.

We can go on and on but a general idea is that for any given problem, we'll be serving only a subset of the technologies above, and if a solution does not apply to all (e.g. 6LowPAN HC used by Wi-Sun) then we'll consider individual solutions, but at least we tried.

My take is to freeze the list *very* soon, including all 4 above in the draft charter, start the work and see where that takes us. If that seems fair, let's issue a last call and move on.

What do others think?

Pascal