Motivation for SIP as an application protocol for 6lowpan devices
draft-roychowdhury-6lowappsip-00

Abstract

The Smart Grid [8] initiative is an effort in modernization of the electricity grid using communication technology with the primary goals of reducing energy consumption, reducing cost (utilities and consumers), increasing reliability and the creation of new services for all participants in the value chain. The core focus of this initiative is the specification of a 'Communications Overlay' network which can help facilitate intelligent communication (discovery, session establishment, routing, addressing to name a few) between various nodes of the heterogeneous Smart Grid network. Roychowdhury Expires - April 2010 [page 1] Motivation for SIP as an application protocol for 6lowpan devices One of the 'network segments' of the Smart Grid network is the Home Area Network (HAN) and how residential and/or commercial devices (such as TV, washing machine, surveillance camera, etc.) interact with the smart meter/energy management system and vice-versa. This draft is an initial input for consideration of SIP as an appropriate application protocol for use inside devices that operate over low powered IP networks. The authors do NOT propose the use of SIP for all HAN devices. Rather, the authors believe that SIP is an appropriate protocol for certain categories of devices and therefore, the 6lowapp group should consider SIP as an appropriate protocol for the same. The final protocol that is ideal for a particular device communication will always be determined by the use-case(s) that are envisioned for the same. This draft does NOT discuss the use of SIP inside the smart meter (while the authors believe that the smart meter would also benefit from SIP, that is the scope of another draft and does not apply to the 6lowapp work). Therefore, in all diagrams and references, the authors have used the term 'Energy Management System (EMS)' to refer to the customer premise EMS that may or may not be the smart meter itself. Conventions used in this document In examples, "C:" and "S:" indicate lines sent by the client and server respectively. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 [1]. The term EMS refers to the customer premise Energy Management System which may be the smart meter or an adjunct devices that communicates with the utility core network for the purposes of energy management and billing.

Authors

Arjun Roychowdhury
Shidan Gouran

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)