Subject: DFF

From: Ulrich Herberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:49:18 -0800

Hi,

In December, I have sent a link to a draft which may be of interest
for the RtgWG. There was not much discussion (maybe because of the
upcoming Christmas holidays), so I was asked by the chairs to resend
the link and ask for review. Below you find a summary of the contents.

I would also like to request a slot at the upcoming Paris IETF to
present the draft.

Our draft describes a data forwarding mechanism, currently specified
for 6lowpan (but it would be doable to add the same mechanism for IPv6
as well). The idea is that a node first tries to forward a data packet
along the route proposed by the routing protocol. However, if the
topology has changed or a link has become unstable, instead of
dropping the packet, the node tries to find alternate paths towards
the destination by applying a "depth-first search" in the network,
possibly updating the route cost in the routing protocol. This allows
for increasing the delivery ratio until the route has been corrected
by the routing protocol. The advantage is that one requires fewer
updates of the control plane, which may have negative effects on an
already unstable topology (e.g. by flooding RREQ or LSAs).
We have done a number of simulations and also real tests with several
hundred nodes at Fujitsu which showed a significant performance
improvement. If you are interested in reading the draft, I would
appreciate any kind of feedback.

I-D
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cardenas-dff

We have code both for the real testbed and for the simulator.
Moreover, I am currently developing open source code.

Some results in a paper (http://www.flacp.fujitsulabs.com/~uherberg/DFF.pdf)
Comparison of Data Forwarding Mechanisms for AMI Networks. Sandra
Céspedes, Alvaro A. Cárdenas, Tadashige Iwao. 2012 IEEE Innovative
Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT). January 17-19, 2012.

Best regards
Ulrich