6Lo Working Group G. Li
Internet-Draft D. Lou
Intended status: Experimental L. Iannone
Expires: 5 September 2022 Huawei
P. Liu
R. Long
China Mobile
4 March 2022
Native Short Addressing for Low power and Lossy Networks Expansion
draft-li-6lo-native-short-address-02
Abstract
This document specifies a topological addressing scheme, Native Short
Address (NSA) that enables IP packet transmission over links where
the transmission of a full length address may not be desirable. This
document focuses on carrying IP packets across an LLN (Low power and
Lossy Network), in which the topology is relatively static where
nodes' location is fixed and the connection between nodes is rather
stable. The changes in the logical topology are only caused by non-
frequent disconnection in the link. The specifications details the
NSA architecture, address allocation, forwarding mechanism, header
format design, including length-variable fields, and IPv6
interconnection support.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 5 September 2022.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
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provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Requirements Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Architectural Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. NSA Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. NSA Addresses and IPv6 Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.2. Limitation of Number of Children Nodes . . . . . . . . . 12
5. Forwarding in a NSA Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1. Forwarding toward an NSA endpoint . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.2. Forwarding toward an external IPv6 node . . . . . . . . . 15
6. Benefits of Native Short Addressing . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7. NSA Header Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
8. NSA Control Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8.1. New Control Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8.2. Address Configuration based on 6LOWPAN-ND . . . . . . . . 19
8.2.1. NSA Request Address Option (NRAO) Format . . . . . . 20
8.2.2. NSA Assign Address Option (NAAO) Format . . . . . . . 20
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9.1. Dispatch Type Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9.2. Allocation Function Registry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9.3. ICMP NSA Control Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
9.4. NSA Neighbor Discovery Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
11. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
11.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
11.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1. Introduction
There is an ongoing massive expansion of the network edge that is
driven by the "Internet of Things" (IoT), especially over low-power
links which often, in the past, did not support IP packet
transmission.
Particularly driven by the requirements stemming from Industry 4.0
and Smart City deployments, more and more devices/things are
connected to the Internet. Sensors in plants/parking bays/mines,
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temperature/humidity/flash sensors in museums, normally are located
in a fixed position and are networked by low power and lossy links
even in hardwired networks. Comparing with traditional scenarios,
scalability of the (edge) network along with lower power consumption
are key technical requirements. Moreover, large-scale Low power
Lossy Networks (LLNs) are expected to be able to carry IPv6 packets
over their links, together with an efficient access to native IPv6
domains.
The work in [SIXLOWPAN]/[SIXLO]/[LPWAN] Working Groups addresses many
fundamental issues for those type of deployments. Those deployments
can be considered an instantiation of what [RFC8799] defines as
"limited domains". For instance, the 6lowpan compression technology
([RFC4944] and [RFC6282]) addresses the problem of IPv6 transmission
over LLNs, making it possible to interconnect IPv6-based IoT networks
and the Internet. [RFC8138] introduces a framework for implementing
multi-hop routing on an LLN using a compressed routing header, which
works also with RPL (Routing Protocol for LLNs [RFC6550]). This
technique enables the ability to forward IPv6 packets within the
domain without the need of decompression. In addition, SCHC (Generic
Framework for Static Context Header Compression and Fragmentation
[RFC8724]) enables even more compression by using a common static
context.
Although aforementioned technologies are suitable in general for all
IoT scenarios, there could be more simplified solutions for those
scenarios and applications with static network topology and stable
network connections leveraging on wired technologies
[I-D.ietf-6lo-use-cases] (e.g. smart building, smart parking, etc.).
In those kinds of deployments, topologies are planned in advance and
well provisioned, with sensor nodes usually fixed in specific
locations. This draft presents a topology based addressing mechanism
with shorter packet header and simpler forwarding rules for those
static IoT networks.
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The specifications in this document leverage on previous work, namely
using the dispatch type field ([RFC4944], [RFC8025]) that allows to
accommodate the proposed address format. This means that except the
addresses (source and destination) the other fields of the header
will be compressed mostly according to LOWPAN_IPHC. The proposed
addressing is independent of Unique Local Addresses [RFC4193], which
has a dependency on specific link-layer conventions [RFC6282]. It is
also different from stateful address allocation that requires all
nodes to obtain addresses from a centralized DHCP server, which leads
to long network startup time and consumption of extra bandwidth.
Compared to RPL-based routing [RFC6550], NSA avoids the extra
overhead of address assignment by integrating address assignment and
tree forming together. Furthermore, NSA provides much smaller
forwarding table size than storing mode RPL.
2. Requirements Notation
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
14 [RFC2119] and [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
3. Architectural Overview
Native Short Address (NSA) is an efficient topology-based network
layer address assignment and packet forwarding mechanism that is
performed in a decentralized fashion. The NSA nodes are aware of
their own IPv6 address, constructed by IPv6 prefix and the NSA (see
Section 4.1 and Section 5.2). Inside the NSA domain, nodes
communicate with each other using only NSA addresses. It is a
smaller address space compared to the huge IPv6 addressing space.
The NSA enables stateless forwarding. When IPv6 communication occurs
between nodes inside the NSA domain and external IPv6 nodes, the
border router, which plays as well the role of "root" in the
addressing tree, performs network address translation (as per
Section 5.2 and [RFC6282]). The architecture of NSA network is
showed in Figure 1.
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/|\ Internet (IPv6)
| --------+--------
IPv6 Domain | |
| |
| +-------+-------+
---------------------------- | Border Router |
| +---------------+
|
| O
|
| O O O
| O O
| O O
NSA Domain | O
| O O O O O O
| O
| O O
| O
| O
|
| Up to several thousands of nodes
|
\|/
LLN
Figure 1: The architecture of general NSA networks.
In the NSA network, there are 3 types of nodes, the root node, the
forwarder node and the leaf node. There is typically one root node
in the NSA network. The root node is responsible for the management
of the whole NSA network and routing/forwarding both internal and
external traffic. It stores the IPv6 prefix of the domain in order
to perform the network address translation for external
communications. It also stores the address Allocation Function (AF)
and performs the address assignment for its children. After
successful address assignment, the root will keep the state of its
children and refresh them when changed. The root node functions as
gateway between the NSA domain and the Internet. As such it also
operates the translation between NSA header and IPv6 header (cf.
Section 5).
A forwarder node is a node, different from the root node, containing
at least one child. The forwarder node is basically the root of a
sub-tree and its role is to forward traffic between its parent and
its children according to addressing. When handling a packet, if the
destination is in its sub-tree, it forwards the packet to the right
child, otherwise it simple sends it to its parent.
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A leaf node is a node with no children. Its operation is simple
since it is either a destination or source of every packet it
handles. If it is the source of packets, it simply sends the packets
to its parent.
Each node acquiring a native short address needs to send an Address
Request (AR) message to its link layer neighbors and wait for the
response. In the AR message, the node needs to designate a 'role'
value (forwarder or leaf) and the 'node-id'. The latter is a unique
identifier of each NSA node, including root, forwarders, and leaves.
This document assumes the use of the link-layer address of the node
as 'node-id'.
Forwarder and Leaf roles can be assigned similarly to IEEE 802.15.4,
which distinguishes between Full-Function Devices (FFD) and reduced
function devices (RFD) (cf., [ZigBee]). If a neighbor is neither a
forwarder nor the root, it will drop the AR message silently.
Otherwise, the neighbor will calculate an address based on parameters
in the AR message. After the neighbor node assigns an address to the
node, using a Allocation function (AF), it stores the suffix of that
address as the interface ID towards the node. Then, it generates and
sends Address Assignment (AA) message back and becomes the parent
node.
This address assignment relies on the base mechanism described in
6lowpan-ND ([RFC6775]), but defines two new options of ND message,
whose format is defined in Section 8.2.1 and Section 8.2.2.
The acceptance of the address assignment follows "first come first
serve" principle. Once a node receives a valid AA response, it uses
that assigned address as its own network layer address, thus becomes
a child of the address assigner. It will then ignore replies from
other neighbors.
If a node does not receive any response after an pre-defined
interval, it will send the AR message again. It is RECOMMENDED that
nodes re-send the AR message up to 3 times, if no answer is received,
they SHOULD stop.
The overall design objective is centered on reducing the size (or
completely avoid the usage) of routing/forwarding table with a
topological addressing scheme to save communication energy in an IoT
LLN network. NSA eliminates compression/decompression of the address
and also reduces the amount of information synchronization messages,
so it actually reduces computation complexity during packets parsing
and forwarding.
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To this end, NSA uses a context-independent address encoding
mechanism. It does not carry any field about address context in the
packet. It carries source and destination addresses by variable
length fields whose size can be reduced to one byte each in the best
case. This allows the NSA packet header to be smaller than
LOWPAN_IPHC's 7 bytes (see Figure 2), down to 4 bytes, representing
around 40% reduction in the header size.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | TF |NH |HLM| | 0 | 1 | 1 | TF |NH | HLIM |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|Payload Length(variable length)| |CID|SAC| SAM | M |DAC| DAM |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|I/O|AM | Src(var len) | | SCI | DCI |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| Dst (var len) | | |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ + Source Address +
| |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| |
+ Destination Address +
| |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
b. IPHC best case header
a. NSA best case header with context-based encoding
and global unicast address
Figure 2: Best case of NSA and LOWPAN_IPHC packet header.
There are three distinct NSA features that allow NSA to be efficient,
namely:
1. Native Short Address allocation (see Section 4),
2. Stateless forwarding (see Section 5),
3. Compact header format design (see Section 7) that avoids context
and compression.
4. NSA Allocation
The basic rules of allocation include:
* Each node's address is prefixed by their parent's address.
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* The root/forwarder runs an AF (Allocation Function) to generate
its children's addresses.
* All nodes run the same AF in the same network instance.
* The maximum length of the NSA address should not exceed 64-bit.
Normally, the root role is assigned to the border router when the LLN
bootstraps. An example of a possible result of an NSA deployment is
shown in Figure 3.
root +--------------------------+
1 | append more bits to form |
O ----+ | brother's address |
/ | \ \ +--------------------------+
/ | \ \
/ | \ \
+---------+ / | \ \
|forwarder| 10 / 11 110\ \ 111
|node | O - O O O
+---------+/ |\ \ | \
/ | \ \ | \
/ | \ \ O O
/ | \ \
100/ 1010| 101 1011 +--------------+
O O O O |Prefix is '10'|
/| /| +--------------+
/ | / |
O O O O
1001 10011 10101 101011
Figure 3: An example of NSA addresses allocation.
The allocation function AF(role,i) used in this document is defined
in Figure 4. Where every forwarder node should store and maintain
two indexes, one for the children that are forwarders and one for the
children that are leaves (starting at 0 for the first child in each
role). Let's call the first index 'f', as of forwarder, and the
second 'l' as for leaves. The '+' symbol indicates a concatenation
operation. The b() operation indicates the binary string of '1' with
length equal to its argument, for instance b(3) returns '111'.
AF(role, f, l) = 'address of the node performing the function'
+ (role == leaf? b(l++):b(f++))
+ (role == leaf?'1':'0'),
in which, f and l are the indexes of respectively the forwarders
and the leaves at this layer (starting at 0).
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Figure 4: Definition of the Allocation Function (AF) of
forwarder/root nodes.
Taking the example of the topology in Figure 3, the proposed AF works
as follows.
At the top level, there are 4 children of root, two are forwarders
and the other two are leaves. Starting from the left most node and
moving to the right, the root node applies the AF as follows:
* For the first child, which is a forwarder:
- A('forwarder', 0, 0) = '1'(root address) + b(0) + '0' = '1' +
'' + '0' = 10
- Index f is increased by one and is now equal 1 (f=1)
* For the second child, which is a leaf:
- A('leaf', 1, 0) = '1'(root address) + b(0) + '1' = '1' + '' +
'1' = 11
- Index l is increased by one and is now equal 1 (l=1)
* For the third child, which is a forwarder:
- A('forwarder', 1, 1) = '1'(root address) + b(1) + '0' = '1' +
'1' + '0' = 110
- Index f is increased by one and is now equal 2 (f=2)
* For the fourth child, which is a leaf:
- A('leaf', 2, 1) = '1'(root address) + b(1) + '1' = '1' + '1' +
'1' = 111
- Index l is increased by one and is now equal 2 (l=2)
The first level addresses have now been assigned. Let's now have a
look how the node 10 (the first forwarder child of the root) applies
the same Allocation Function. Note that node 10 will use its own 'f'
and 'l' indexes initialized to 0. Starting again from the left most
node, node 10 applies the AF as follows:
* For the first child, which is a forwarder:
- A('forwarder', 0, 0) = '10'(node address) + b(0) + '0' = '10' +
'' + '0' = 100
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- Index f is increased by one and is now equal 1 (f=1)
* For the second child, which is a leaf:
- A('leaf', 1, 0) = '10'(node address) + b(0) + '1' = '10' + '' +
'1' = 101
- Index l is increased by one and is now equal 1 (l=1)
* For the third child, which is a forwarder:
- A('forwarder', 1, 1) = '10'(node address) + b(1) + '0' = '10' +
'1' + '0' = 1010
- Index f is increased by one and is now equal 2 (f=2)
* For the fourth child, which is a leaf:
- A('leaf', 2, 1) = '10'(node address) + b(1) + '1' = '10' + '1'
+ '1' = 1011
- Index l is increased by one and is now equal 2 (l=2)
Note how the children of the same parent all have the same prefix (10
in this example). The proposed AF algorithmically assigns addresses
to the different nodes without the need to know the topology in
advance. However, the largest address of the network will depend on
the actual topology. Indeed, the maximum length of an address with
the proposed AF grows linearly at each level of the tree with the
number of siblings from the same parent. Let's take again the
example in Figure 3 and let's assume that the children of node 10 are
all leaves, for the largest address we need 2 bits to encode the
parent node prefix (10 in this case) to which we need to add a number
of '1' equal to the value of the l index which is the number of
leaves minus one (because the first leaf has index 0), in this case
since there are 4 leaves, the index value is 3 and we add the '111'
string, hence the address length would be 6 (2 for the prefix, 3 to
encode the 4th leaf address, and one for the final 1 the ends all
leaves addresses). In a more formal way the maximum address length
at each level can be calculated as (where Ceiling just returns the
least integer greater or equal its argument):
Max_Length = length(Parent address)
length(b(max(f,l)))
+ 1
Where f and l are the indexes counting respectively the forwarders
and the leaves at this level.
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The Allocation Function can be different from the one defined in
Figure 4, but all nodes know which one to use by configuration. The
use of one and only one AF is allowed in an NSA domain. It is
RECOMMENDED that implementations support at least the AF proposed in
this document (cf. Section 9).
Different allocation function may, for example, leverage on a priori
knowledge of the topology in order to optimize the maximum address
size and make it smaller. For instance, because the order of address
allocation has an impact on the size, the address of children with
the largest subtree should be allocated in the first place so to
reduce the average address length of the whole subtree. Also,
knowing the traffic in advance, or being able to have an estimation,
can help to minimize the size of addresses that have a lot of
traffic. This kind of optimization can be an option, the
specification of optimizations is out of the scope of this document
and may be defined in new Allocation Functions to be added to the
"Allocation Function Registry" (see Section 9).
4.1. NSA Addresses and IPv6 Addresses
Obtaining a full IPv6 address from a NSA address is pretty
straightforward. First the NSA address is concatenated to the
configured IPv6 prefix. Since the length of the NSA address is
smaller than or equal to 64 bits (the interface ID length in IPv6),
the node needs to pad it with zeros ('0') used as most significant
bits. The full IPv6 address will look like: IPv6 prefix +
"000...000" + NSA (or in IPv6 notation <IPv6 Prefix>::<NSA>). The
NSA is assigned by the root/forwarder as previously described.
In an IPv6 communication, the node will derive the NSA address as the
short source address from its own IPv6 address by simply removing the
IPv6 prefix and all leading zeros before the NSA part. The node will
compare the destination IPv6 address with its own IPv6 address. If
they have the same prefix, it means that the destination is in the
local NSA domain and its corresponding NSA address will be extracted
as the short destination address (and the I/O Flag can be set
accordingly). Otherwise, it will be a communication towards the
Internet. In that case, a mapping mechanism implemented on the root
node will generate a short address to be mapped to the full IPv6
destination address. For instance, the mapped short address can be
generated using the least significative bits of the original IPv6
address. As previously stated, the mapping mechanism is out of the
scope of this document.
Since the short mapped address is generated on the root, when the
node first open the connection toward the external site, with a first
packet, the destination address is set to the full, uncompressed,
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IPv6 address. Once the packet arrives to the root node, performing
the destination address lookup the root will notice that a full IPv6
address is being used and will trigger the short address generation
mechanism and create a new mapping. Such, mapping is communicated to
the source node via a new dedicated ICMP message (see Section 8).
Once the node originating the communication receives such a message
it SHOULD use the mapped short address for any further communication.
4.2. Limitation of Number of Children Nodes
The maximum number of child nodes is determined by the specific AF
used. IEEE 802.15.5 has explored the use of a per-branch setup,
which, however, incurs scalability problems [LEE10]. NSA allocation
design is more flexible and extensible than the one proposed in IEEE
802.15.5. The AF used as example in this document does not need any
specific setup network by network, though it is still limited by the
maximum length of addresses. For the special case of the parent
connecting to huge amount of children, a variant of the proposed AF
can be designed to fulfill the requirement and optimize the address
allocation (as previously described).
5. Forwarding in a NSA Network
Internal and external communications in an NSA network work slightly
different. For internal communications, among NSA endpoints, packets
carry native short addresses and no special operation is needed. For
external communications, the root is responsible to perform the
translation between native short addresses and IPv6 addresses. For
instance, for a packet entering into the NSA domain, the root will
extract the native short address of the destination from the suffix
of the IPv6 address, by removing all leading '0's. It will also map
the source IPv6 address to a mapped native short address, in order to
make it more efficient for communication inside the NSA domain.
The root has to store the mapping between external IPv6 addresses and
their assigned mapped Native Short Addresses. The method of
generating those mapping is out of scope of this document, however,
the addressing space for the external NSA has to be maintained
separate from the internal NSA address space. Overlap are allowed
since the two addressing space are distinguishable in the packets by
the use of the I/O field, as explained later on.
The following paragraphs will detail the forwarding operations for
both internal and external communication. The intra-network
forwarding procedure depends on the specific AF used. Here we will
use the AF previously introduced (see Figure 4) to illustrate the
forwarding procedure.
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5.1. Forwarding toward an NSA endpoint
To perform forwarding operations, NSA nodes access the I/O field in
the NSA header (see Section 7). When its value is 1, the packet is
destined to an internal NSA node, so it is an inner-domain packet.
Otherwise, the packet is destined to an external IPv6 node. It is
called an outer-domain packet. Intra-domain packets carry a native
short addresses in the source and the destination address fields.
More specifically the destination address field is the address of
another node in the same NSA domain. As such an NSA node performs
the following sequence of actions (also see Figure 5):
1. Get destination address from packet (abbreviated to DA) and the
current node's address (abbreviated to CA). Go to step 2.
2. If length of DA is smaller than length of CA, send the packet to
parent node, exit. Otherwise, go to step 3.
3. If length of DA equals to length of CA, go to step 4. Otherwise,
go to step 5.
4. If DA and CA are the same, the packet arrived at destination,
exit. Otherwise, send the packet to parent node, exit.
5. Check whether CA is equal to the prefix of DA. If yes, go to
step 6. Otherwise, send the packet to parent node, exit.
6. Calculate which child is the next hop address and forward packet
to it. With the AF propose in this document such operation
reduces to reading the DA's bits starting from the position
equals to the length of CA, then skip all '1' until the first '0'
or the last bit of DA. The sub-string obtained in such a way is
the address of direct child of current node.
7. If any exception happens in the above steps, drop the packet and
send error notification.
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/*\ DA:Destination Address
|***| CA:Current Node's Address
\*/
|
+--------+--------+
|Parse DA from pkt|
+--------+--------+
|
\|/
+-------+------+
/ \ yes
| Len(DA)<Len(CA)? |-------------------------------+
\ / |
+-------+------+ |
| no |
\|/ |
+-------+------+ +--------------+ |
/ \ yes / \ no |
| Len(DA)=Len(CA)? |------>| CA == DA ? |--->+
\ / \ / |
+-------+------+ +-------+------+ |
| no | yes |
\|/ /*\ |
+-------+------+ |***| |
/ \ no \*/ |
| CA==PrefixOf(DA)?|------------------------------>+
\ / |
+-------+------+ |
| yes |
\|/ \|/
+---------+---------+ +---------+---------+
| Calculate next-hop| | Forward to Parent |
| & | +---------+---------+
| Forward | |
+---------+---------+ |
|<---------------------------------------+
\|/
/*\
|***|
\*/
Figure 5: Flow Chart of Internal Forwarding Procedure
In the case of packet arriving from the Internet (external IPv6
domain toward the local NSA domain) header adaptation operation is
performed by the root node. Concerning the destination address, the
root builds the native short address of the destination by removing
the prefix and the leading '0's of the suffix of the destination
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address. Meanwhile, it checks whether it exists already a mapping
between the source address and a mapped NSA address to be used as
source address in the NSA packet. If not it creates one. Then the
root creates the inner-domain packet. It uses the NSA address as
destination setting the I/O field to 1 so to route the packet to as
described above to the destination node. The mapped NSA address is
used as source address and the fact that is a Mapped Address is
signaled by setting to 1 the MA field.
5.2. Forwarding toward an external IPv6 node
In the case that the I/O field (cf. Section 7) is set to 0, the
packet is destined to an external IPv6 node, it is an outer-domain
packet. As such the destination address is either a full IPv6
address (for the first packet of a communication) or a mapped short
address generated by the root node and not belonging to any node
inside the NSA domain.
All NSA nodes (except root) just send packets that are destined
outside the local domain (I/O field equal 0) to their parent, not
even looking at the actual destination address. Eventually all
packets will reach the root node, which acts as gateway. The root
node is able to map the destination NSA address to the corresponding
full IPv6 address. Also, the root node is able to rebuild the full
source IPv6 address by concatenating the IPv6 prefix and the NSA
address as explained in Section 5.2. Other fields of the header are
also decompressed as described in Section 7. A full IPv6 header
replaces the original NSA header in the packet, which is then
forwarded according to traditional IPv6 protocol.
6. Benefits of Native Short Addressing
The NSA use a single set of messages for address assignment and tree
forming. It is not more complex than RPL tree forming. So, NSA
saves the overhead of address assignment of RPL.
Comparing to RPL with storing mode (see [RFC6550]), there is no need
for a NSA node to generate and store forwarding table entries in the
normal case. One of the potential issues is the risk of renumbering
of addresses in case of topology changes. Because of the
applicability domain of NSA, the common case of topology change is
known in advance and can be planned, so to reduce disruption due to
renumbering. Another case is temporary link failures where the
underlying technology is still able to provide connectivity through
alternative links.
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In this scenario a node can temporarily "move" along with its whole
subtree. Instead of performing a renumbering of the whole subtree,
which may cause disruption, the subtree rooted on the "moving" node,
its address and the addresses of all its children and grand-children
can be kept unchanged, by creating a temporary entry in the
forwarding tables of the original and new parent nodes, in order to
make the subtree still reachable.
Herewith one example, also depicted in Figure 6, node A with the
address of 1000 somehow moves from node B (original parent) to node C
(new parent). In this case, the forwarding tables in B, C and their
parents' nodes should be updated by adding a new entry to "1000", the
address of node A. Meanwhile, the original parent (node B) should
keep its original address assignment. Comparing with renumbering the
addresses of node A and its children, the cost of adding one new
route to their parent nodes is much lower, although in this case, the
NSA does not implement complete stateless forwarding. However, this
solution SHOULD be used only in case of temporary topology changes,
where the entries will be deleted once the original topology is re-
established. On top of that, it is RECOMMENDED to perform the re-
numbering by running the NSA Allocation Function periodically.
+------------------+
| Add route: |
|to 1000, ia 1010 | 1
+------------------+ O
* /
+-----------------+ * /
| Add route: | * /
| to 1000, via 10 | O 10
+-----------------+ / \
* / \
* / \ 1010 (node C)
(node B)100 O O
. / *
. / *-----------------+
. / | Add route: |
O / | to 1000, direct |
1000(node A) +-----------------+
Figure 6: Add extra routes for "logic topology change
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7. NSA Header Format
As explained in Section 4, the addresses in NSA are of variable
length, in this section, we outline the design of the header format
partially based on the format of 6lowPAN, accommodating the variable
length property in the packet. The header format is shown in
Figure 7.
0 1
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | TF |NH |HL | Payload Length(Variable Len) |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
|I/O|MA | SA(Variable Len) | DA(Variable Len) |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| In-line fields ... |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
Figure 7: Header format of NSA packets
The first 4 bits are new dispatch types that will be introduced in
Section 9.
* TF: The same definition as in [RFC6282] Section 3.1.1.
* NH: The same definition as in [RFC6282] Section 3.1.1.
* HL: This field indicates the hop limit. When HL is 1, a hop limit
field defined in [RFC2460] locates in in-line fields, while HL is
0 means no hop limit header in packet.
* Payload length is a variable length field. It normally occupies
an byte assuming most packets are smaller than 252 bytes. For
larger packets, payload length may expand to 2 to 3 bytes. The
encoding method is defined as follows. When the first byte has
value of:
- 0~252: Indicates how many bytes the payload consist of.
- 253: Indicates that there is an extra byte for payload length,
with the actual length value equal to the last byte value plus
252.
- 254: Indicates that there is an extra two bytes for payload
length, with the actual length value obtained from the second
and third bytes interpreted as a 16 bits unsigned integer plus
252 (from the first byte).
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- 255: Reserved.
* I/O: Indicates whether this packet is destined to a inner-domain
node (value '1') or an outer-domain node (value '0'), where the
former means from an NSA or IPv6 node to a NSA destination, while
the latter means to an external IPv6 node.
* MA: Indicates the source address is actually a Mapped Address
generated by the root. When it is '1', the source address of the
packet is a mapped address of an external IPv6 address, while if
it is '0', the source address of the packet is an NSA address.
For length variable native short address encoding, for both Source
Address (SA) and Destination Address (DA), the definition is:
* 0~252: if the address value locates in this interval, one byte is
used to encode the value
* 253: indicates that the following 2 bytes encode the address.
* 254: indicates that the following 4 bytes encode the address.
* 255: indicates that the following byte defines the length of
address in bytes, followed by the address bytes.
The sequence of in-line fields is as per [RFC8200] section 3.
8. NSA Control Message
8.1. New Control Message
This documents specifies only one new NSA Control Message, namely the
NSA Mapped Address Advertisement described in Section 4. The purpose
of such a message is advertise the mapping of an IPv6 address into a
NSA address. The map is performed by the root node and sent to the
node originating the communication. The root keeps a copy of the
mapping to be used for future packets. The format is as follows:
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0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Type | Code = 0x00 | Reserved | NSA Length |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| |
| Target IPv6 Address (Fixed length 128 bist) |
| |
| |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Target NSA Address (Variable length) .... |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
* Type: Type value identifying NSA Control Message. Value to be
assigned by IANA (cf. Section 9)
* Code: This field identifies the specific control message. In this
case it is set to the value 0x00 "NSA Mapped Address for External
IPv6 Address".
* Reserved: Set as 0 on transmission and ignored on reception.
* NSA Length: This field indicates the length of the Target NSA
Address at the end of the message, expressed in bytes.
The "NSA Mapped Address for External IPv6 Address" is a variable
length message, however, the first five fields of the message, namely
Type, Code Reserved, NSA Length, and Target IPv6 address, have a
fixed length of 160 bits (20 bytes), hence the length of the NSA
address is sufficient to calculate the length of the entire packet:
20 bytes + "NSA length".
8.2. Address Configuration based on 6LOWPAN-ND
According to [rfc6775], neighbor discovery is available in 6LoWPANs.
This document specifies NSA address configuration mechanism based on
RS (Router Solicitation) and solicited RA (Router Advertisement)
defined in [RFC4861]. In order for an NSA node to request an
address, it uses a newly defined 'Request Address Option (NRAO)' in
RS messages. The corresponding solicited RA will contain the 'NSA
Assign Address Option (NAAO)' with the assigned address.
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8.2.1. NSA Request Address Option (NRAO) Format
This option will be carried in RS messages [RFC4861] when node
initializes. The same RS messages MUST carry the Source Link-Layer
Address Option (SLLAO) ([RFC4861], [RFC6775]) as well. The link-
layer address in SLLAO (Source Link-Layer Address Option will be used
to identify unique NSA node. The NRAO format is defined as follows:
+---------------+--------------+-------------------------------+
| Type | Length | Expected Address Lifetime |
+---------------+--------------+-------------------------------+
| Reserved |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
* Type: 136
* Length: 8-bit unsigned integer. The length of the option
(including the Type and Length fields) in units of 8 bytes. Be
always 1.
* Expected Address Lifetime: The sender of RS notify the node that
assigns the address for how long is expected to be valid. The
receiver may ignore this field. The unit is 1 second. This field
should be set to zero by sender if there is no requirement on the
lifetime.
* Reserved: These fields are unused. They MUST be initialized to
zero by the sender and MUST be ignored by the receiver.
8.2.2. NSA Assign Address Option (NAAO) Format
This option will be carried in RA message solicited by the an RS
message as for the usual Neighbor Discovery workflow. The NAAO
format is defined as follows:
+---------------+--------------+-------------------------------+
| Type | Length | Address Lifetime |
+---------------+--------------+-------------------------------+
| Prefix Length | Reserved |
+---------------+----------------------------------------------+
| |
| |
| |
| NSA with IPv6 Prefix |
| |
| |
| |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
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* Type: 137
* Length: 8-bit unsigned integer. The length of the option
(including the Type and Length fields) in units of 8 bytes. Be
always 3.
* Address Lifetime: The maximum seconds for the NSA being valid.
The node with this address MUST stop using this address for packet
transmission when the life time expires. When the Address
Lifetime is zero, the node must drop the address immediately.
When the lifetime field is 0xFFFF, the address will be valid
forever until the node sends another NAAO to update the lifetime.
* Prefix Length: This field will notify the receiver the length of
the the IPv6 prefix.
* Reserved: These fields are unused. They MUST be initialized to
zero by the sender and MUST be ignored by the receiver.
* NSA with IPv6 Prefix:This field is filled by the node with the
IPv6 prefix (according with the length field), the NSA address as
the least significant bit of the IPv6 address, and filling the
remaining bits in the middle with zeros.
9. IANA Considerations
9.1. Dispatch Type Field
This document requires IANA to assign the range 01010000 to 01011111
in page 10 of the "Dispatch Type Field" registry as follows:
+-------------+----+-----------------------------+---------------+
| Bit Pattern |Page| Header Type | Reference |
+-------------+----+-----------------------------+---------------+
| 0101TTNH | 10 | LOWPAN NSA IP(LOWPAN_NIP) |[This Document]|
+-------------+----+-----------------------------+---------------+
Figure 8: LOWPAN Dispatch Type Field requested allocation
9.2. Allocation Function Registry
This section provides guidance to the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority (IANA) regarding registration of values related to the NSA
specification, in accordance with BCP 26 [RFC8126].
IANA is asked to create a registry named "Native Short Addresses
(NSA) Parameters".
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Such registry should be populated with a one byte sub registry named
"Allocation Function" and used to identify the AF used in a NSA
deployment. The sub registry is populated as follows:
+---------+----------------------------+-----------------+
| Value | AF Name | Reference |
+---------+----------------------------+-----------------+
| 0x00 | Native Allocation Function | [This Document] |
+---------+----------------------------+-----------------+
|0x01-0xFF| Un-assigned | |
+---------+----------------------------+-----------------+
Values can be assigned by IANA on a "First Come, First Served" basis
according to [RFC8126].
9.3. ICMP NSA Control Message
IANA is requested to allocate an ICMPv6 type value from the "ICMPv6
Parameters" registry to be used by "NSA Control Message".
Also IANA is requested to create an "NSA Control Codes" sub registry,
for the Code field of the ICMPv6 NSA Control Message.
New codes may be allocated through the "Specification Required"
procedure as defined in [RFC8126]. The following code is currently
defined (the others are to be marked as un-assigned):
+------+--------------------------------------------+---------------+
| Code | Description | Reference |
+------+--------------------------------------------+---------------+
| 0x00 |NSA Mapped Address for External IPv6 Address|[This Document]|
+------+--------------------------------------------+---------------+
9.4. NSA Neighbor Discovery Options
IANA is requested to allocate two values from the "IPv6 Neighbor
Discovery Option Formats" registry to be used by NRAO and NAAO.
+------+--------------------------------------------+---------------+
| Code | Description | Reference |
+------+--------------------------------------------+---------------+
| 136 | NSA Request Address Option |[This Document]|
+------+--------------------------------------------+---------------+
| 137 | NSA Assign Address Option |[This Document]|
+------+--------------------------------------------+---------------+
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10. Security Considerations
An extended security analysis will be provided in future revision of
this document. As of this point we consider that the security
considerations of [RFC4944], [RFC6282] apply.
11. References
11.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC2460] Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6
(IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, DOI 10.17487/RFC2460,
December 1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2460>.
[RFC4944] Montenegro, G., Kushalnagar, N., Hui, J., and D. Culler,
"Transmission of IPv6 Packets over IEEE 802.15.4
Networks", RFC 4944, DOI 10.17487/RFC4944, September 2007,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4944>.
[RFC6282] Hui, J., Ed. and P. Thubert, "Compression Format for IPv6
Datagrams over IEEE 802.15.4-Based Networks", RFC 6282,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6282, September 2011,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6282>.
[RFC6550] Winter, T., Ed., Thubert, P., Ed., Brandt, A., Hui, J.,
Kelsey, R., Levis, P., Pister, K., Struik, R., Vasseur,
JP., and R. Alexander, "RPL: IPv6 Routing Protocol for
Low-Power and Lossy Networks", RFC 6550,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6550, March 2012,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6550>.
[RFC8025] Thubert, P., Ed. and R. Cragie, "IPv6 over Low-Power
Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) Paging Dispatch",
RFC 8025, DOI 10.17487/RFC8025, November 2016,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8025>.
[RFC8126] Cotton, M., Leiba, B., and T. Narten, "Guidelines for
Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26,
RFC 8126, DOI 10.17487/RFC8126, June 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8126>.
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[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.
[RFC8200] Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6
(IPv6) Specification", STD 86, RFC 8200,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8200, July 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8200>.
11.2. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-6lo-use-cases]
Hong, Y., Gomez, C., Choi, Y., Sangi, A. R., and S.
Chakrabarti, "IPv6 over Constrained Node Networks (6lo)
Applicability & Use cases", Work in Progress, Internet-
Draft, draft-ietf-6lo-use-cases-12, 25 January 2022,
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-6lo-use-cases-
12.txt>.
[LEE10] Lee, M., Zhang, R., Zheng, J., Ahn, G., Zhu, C., Park, T.,
Cho, S., Shin, C., and J. Ryu, "IEEE 802.15.5 WPAN mesh
standard-low rate part: Meshing the wireless sensor
networks", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communications Vol. 28, pp. 973-983,
DOI 10.1109/jsac.2010.100902, September 2010,
<https://doi.org/10.1109/jsac.2010.100902>.
[LPWAN] "IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan) WG", n.d.,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lpwan/about/>.
[RFC4193] Hinden, R. and B. Haberman, "Unique Local IPv6 Unicast
Addresses", RFC 4193, DOI 10.17487/RFC4193, October 2005,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4193>.
[RFC4861] Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W., and H. Soliman,
"Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6)", RFC 4861,
DOI 10.17487/RFC4861, September 2007,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4861>.
[RFC6775] Shelby, Z., Ed., Chakrabarti, S., Nordmark, E., and C.
Bormann, "Neighbor Discovery Optimization for IPv6 over
Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs)",
RFC 6775, DOI 10.17487/RFC6775, November 2012,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6775>.
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[rfc6775] Shelby, Z., Ed., Chakrabarti, S., Nordmark, E., and C.
Bormann, "Neighbor Discovery Optimization for IPv6 over
Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs)",
RFC 6775, DOI 10.17487/RFC6775, November 2012,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6775>.
[RFC8138] Thubert, P., Ed., Bormann, C., Toutain, L., and R. Cragie,
"IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network
(6LoWPAN) Routing Header", RFC 8138, DOI 10.17487/RFC8138,
April 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8138>.
[RFC8724] Minaburo, A., Toutain, L., Gomez, C., Barthel, D., and JC.
Zuniga, "SCHC: Generic Framework for Static Context Header
Compression and Fragmentation", RFC 8724,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8724, April 2020,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8724>.
[RFC8799] Carpenter, B. and B. Liu, "Limited Domains and Internet
Protocols", RFC 8799, DOI 10.17487/RFC8799, July 2020,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8799>.
[SIXLO] "IPv6 over Networks of Resource-constrained Nodes (6lo)
WG", n.d., <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6lo/about/>.
[SIXLOWPAN]
"IPv6 over Low power WPAN (6lowpan) - Concluded WG", n.d.,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6lowpan/about/>.
[ZigBee] "ZigBee Wireless Networks and Transceivers",
Elsevier book, DOI 10.1016/b978-0-7506-8393-7.x0001-5,
2008,
<https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-7506-8393-7.x0001-5>.
Authors' Addresses
Guangpeng Li
Huawei Technologies
Beiqing Road, Haidian District
Beijing
100095
China
Email: liguangpeng@huawei.com
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David Lou
Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH
Riesstrasse 25
80992 Munich
Germany
Email: zhe.lou@huawei.com
Luigi Iannone
Huawei Technologies France S.A.S.U.
18, Quai du Point du Jour
92100 Boulogne-Billancourt
France
Email: luigi.iannone@huawei.com
Peng Liu
China Mobile
No. 53, Xibianmen Inner Street, Xicheng District
Beijing
100053
China
Email: liupengyjy@chinamobile.com
Rong Long
China Mobile
No. 53, Xibianmen Inner Street, Xicheng District
Beijing
100053
China
Email: longrong@chinamobile.com
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