I added the Contiki and linux-zigbee lists....

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 4:53 PM, Umberto Manzoli <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 13 July 2010 20:47, Jon Smirl <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> PPP/SLIP are adding an unnecessary layer of complexity. For example
>> I'm not sure yet if they work right for IPv6.  It also makes routing
>> more complex. Now the 802.15.4 LAN is hooked to the Ethernet LAN by a
>> PTP link instead of a direct connection. Broadcast packets are not
>> normally forwarded over PTP links so radvd is messed up. All of this
>> is making me learn a lot more about IPv6 than I wanted to.
>>
> The main problem is that PPP - because of the presence of a "type of upper
> protocol" field in its frame - can handle different protocols in its
> payload, so there are extensions for IPv6 and IPv6CP (IPv6 Control Protocol
> for PPP). Moreover, through LCP packets, it is possible to manage the status
> of the link, i.e. it is possible to send and receive alive packets to and
> from the device and thus to automatically disconnect from the serial device
> and make some further retries.
> RFC 5072 : IPv6 over PPP
> RFC 5172 : IPv6CP
>
> SLIP is not recommended for IPv6 operations and IPv6 extensions are not
> supported by all operating systems, as it is only a straight-and-forward way
> to encapsulate IP frames into a serial stream. There is no link control,
> neither different protocol handling.
>
> The big problem with PPP is that the connected device turns into a router,
> so a lot of Contiki routing stuff should be rewritten in order to process
> and forward IP packets (maybe in different context/prefixes). This means
> that device should answer to router-broadcast FE80::2 and forward them.
> The other main problem is that, as the connected device acts as a router,
> you cannot easily copy-and-forward packets from one interface to another,
> but you should route them. So radvd should/could run over the connected
> device and the 6LoWPAN nwk and the PPP link should be given different
> prefixes and a way to correctly define routing should be provided, at least
> at application level, once the PPP link is up.
> Again, it is supposed that Linux sets up a PPP link as a slave (i.e. similar
> way to the one you use when connecting to a standard modem). Thus, up to
> now, IPCP and IPV6CP do provide needed IPv4 addresses and IPv6 interface
> identifiers. As PPP means point-to-point, Linux do not forward neighbour
> discovery/solicitations over the PPP link.

I'm about ready to declare that hooking these devices up over a PTP
protocol link is too much trouble.

The alternative is the linux-zigbee model. That means treating the USB
stick as a dumb radio and running 6lowpan/RPL on the Linux host.

I'm looking for a good routing solution to the multiple gateway
problem. Say you have a net of 200 RPL devices and five gateways. I
want the RPL devices to use the nearest gateway. I don't want the
packets making 10 hops to getting to a gateway that is far away.

Complicating things more, my gateways are wired together with 1GbE.
How are the packets gong to figure out that it is faster to hop to a
gateway, use the 1GbE and then hop back into the RPL net.

>
> Bye,
>   UM
>



-- 
Jon Smirl
[email protected]

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