Subject: [lp-wan] charter v2

From: "Pascal Thubert (pthubert)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2019 14:35:41 +0000

Dear all ;

We discussed the new proposed charter in IETF 103 and again yesterday during our interim (see
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/interim-2019-lpwan-02/materials/minutes-interim-2019-lpwan-02-201901161700).

The bottom line is that we delivered SCHC are are now willing to recharter to continue the work.
Based on our discussions, the new charter would be as follows. Please feed back!

The chairs

Charter LPWAN 2.0

        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, a star
        topology, frame sizes in the order of tens of bytes transmitted
        a few times per day at ultra-low speeds and sometimes variable MTUs,
        and, though downstream may be supported, a mostly upstream transmission
        pattern that allows the devices to spend most of their time in low-
        energy deep-sleep mode.

        This enables a range of several kilometers and a long battery lifetime,
        possibly ten years operating 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 layer 2 frame formats are optimized
        and specific to each individual technology. There is no network layer
        and the application is often hard wired to the layer 2 frame format,
        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 by introducing a network layer, and enable common
        components for management and security, as well as shared application
        profiles. The IETF can contribute by providing IPv6 connectivity, and
        propose technologies to secure the operations and manage the devices and
        their gateways.

        The Working Group will focus on enabling IPv6 connectivity over the
        following selection of Low-Power Wide-Area technologies: SIGFOX, LoRa,
        IEEE 802.15.4w (WIP) and NB-IOT. WI-SUN is still considered but there is
        no chartered item that is specific to that technology.

        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 describing LPWA
        technologies and their needs as well as new standard work to optimize
        IPv6-based communications to the end device

        The group will:

        1) Produce a Standards Track document to enable the compression and
        fragmentation of a CoAP messages over LPWA networks. This will be
        achieved through stateful mechanisms, for a relevant subset of the
        possible CoAP interactions (TBD as part of the work).

        2) Produce Standard Track documents to apply SCHC IPv6/UDP over baseline
        technologies including LoRa, SIGFOX, NBIOT and 802.15.4w.

        3) Produce a Standards Track document to define the generic data models
        to formalize the compression and fragmentation contexts.

        4) Produce a Standards Track document to enable some operations,
        administration and maintenance (OAM) to the LPWAN device, including but
        not limited to support for delayed or proxyed liveliness verification
        (Ping) and path discovery (Traceroute).