Asymmetric IPv6 for Resource-constrained IoT Networks
draft-jiang-asymmetric-ipv6-04
Network Working Group S. Jiang
Internet-Draft Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd
Intended status: Informational G. Li
Expires: 19 May 2021 Huawei Technologies
B. E. Carpenter
Univ. of Auckland
15 November 2020
Asymmetric IPv6 for Resource-constrained IoT Networks
draft-jiang-asymmetric-ipv6-04
Abstract
This document describes a new approach to IPv6 header compression for
use in scenarios where minimizing packet size is crucial but routing
performance must be maximised.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 19 May 2021.
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Jiang, et al. Expires 19 May 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Asymmetric IPv6 November 2020
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Proposed Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Address Transformation at the Gateway . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Routing without Decompression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Address Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Compatibility with Existing Protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
7. Relationship to Static Context Header Compression . . . . . . 7
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
10. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
11. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Appendix A. Change log [RFC Editor: Please remove] . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1. Introduction
The large address space of IPv6 is essential for the massive
expansion of the network edge that will be caused by "Internet of
Things" (IoT) technology over low-power or 5G links. However, the
size of a raw IPv6 packet header causes difficulty due to the small
maximum transmission units (MTU) allowed by typical low-power, low-
cost link layers. For 5G, the importance of header overhead in small
packets is discussed in [NGMN-5G]. Thus header compression,
including address compression, is an important issue. This decreases
the size of raw packets, but compressed IP addresses are not
routeable except by decompressing them completely in every forwarding
node. There are two issues here. The first is the extra computation
resource needed for compressing or decompressing in constrained IoT
nodes. The second is that full-length IPv6 routing will consume more
memory to store routing tables and packet queues (assuming that
routing is not bypassed by tunnelling). Such resource consumption is
very undesirable in constrained nodes with limited storage, CPU
power, and battery capacity.
To mitigate these issues, here we propose a solution enabling the
shortening of IPv6 addresses inside packets, and the routing of
packets according to short addresses, without needing the overhead of
a decompression step prior to route lookup. Considering that the
scale and size of edge networks may vary widely, different lengths of
short address can be used in different domains.
As an illustrative example, consider an edge network which is known
to never require more than a few hundred nodes, which in most cases
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