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draft-eckert-ietf-and-energy-overview-00.txt
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Network Working Group T. Eckert
Internet-Draft Futurewei Technologies USA
Intended status: Informational 20 June 2022
Expires: 22 December 2022
IETF and Energy - an overview
draft-eckert-ietf-and-energy-overview-00
Abstract
This memo attempts to provide an overview of work performed by or
proposed to the IETF relates to energy and/or green: Awareness,
management, control or reduction of consumption of energy, and
sustainability as it related to the IETF.
This document is written to help those unfamiliar with the work but
interested in it, in the hope to raise interest in energy related
activites in the IETF, such as identifyng gaps and working on
solution opportunities.
In general, this document attempts to summarize existing work. On
occasion it elaborates more details in support of better
understanding the energy relationship of specific technologies, when
this background can not be found from existing draft/RFCs.
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 22 December 2022.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
Eckert Expires 22 December 2022 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft energy-overview June 2022
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.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Energy saving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Digitization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. Energy saving through scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2.1. An example: Telephony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.2. The packet multiplexing principle . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.3. End-to-end transport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.4. Internet routing architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.5. Freedom to innovate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2.6. End-to-end encryption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2.7. Converged networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2.7.1. IntServ and DetNet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2.7.2. DiffServ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2.7.3. SIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3. Higher or new energy consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.1. Follow the energy cloud scheduling . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.2. Minimize generated heat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.3. Heat recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.4. Telecollaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. Energy saving in networks and nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1. Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN) . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1.1. 6LOWPAN WG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1.2. LPWAN WG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.1.3. 6TISCH WG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.1.4. 6LO WG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.1.5. ROLL WG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.2. Constrained Nodes and Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.2.1. LWIG WG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.2.2. CORE and CoAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.3. Selected cross-WG technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.3.1. (IP) Multicast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.3.1.1. Power saving with multicast . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.3.1.2. Power waste through multicast based service
coordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.3.1.3. Multicast problems with WiFi . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.3.2. Sleepy nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
6. Energy Management Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.1. Smart Grid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.2. Syncro Phasor Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Eckert Expires 22 December 2022 [Page 2]
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7. Energy Management in Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
7.1. Metrics and costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
7.2. EMAN WG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
8. Power awareness in network forwarding and routing
protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
8.1. Power Aware Networks (PANET) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
8.2. Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9. Gaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
10. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
11. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
1. Introduction
This document summarizes work that has been proposed to or performed
by the IETF. This means that it covers IETF RFC as well as
individual submission RFC and IETF or individual submission drafts
that where abandoned. For this document, IETF also includes work
proposed to or performed by the IRTF. All this is loosely referred
to as 'IETF work' in this memo.
There are various aspects how work can relate to energy. This
document does not attempt to propose a taxonomy or ontology, but it
is nevertheless structured around various classifictions. Many
technologies discussed will fall into multiple categories. Each is
listed under a category that is specifically significant for example
by being most narrow.
This memo usually refers for the technologies by significant early
RFC or draft version, as opposed to the newest. This is contrary to
the common practice in IETF documents to refer to the newest version.
This is done because it allows readers to better understand the
historic timeline in which specific technology was introduced.
Especially successful IETF technologies will have newer RFC that
updates such initial work.
2. Energy saving
Technologies that simply save energy compared to earlier/other
alternatives are the broadest and most unspecific category. In this
memo such energy saving simply refers to energy savings in some unit
of electricity, such as kWh and does not take other aspects into
account. See Section 4
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2.1. Digitization
Digitization describes the transformation of processes from non or
less digital with networking to more digital with computer-
networking. For comparable process results, the digitized option is
often, but not always, less energy consuming. Consider for example
energy consumption in the evolution of messaging starting from postal
mail and overs telegrams and various other historic form to solutions
including e-mail utilizing for example the IETF "Simple Mail
Transport Protocol" (SMTP, [RFC822]), group communications utiziling
the IETF "Network News Transport Protocol" (NNTP, [RFC3977]) or the
almost infinite set of communication options built on top of the IETF
"HyperText Transport Protocol" (HTTP, [RFC2086] and successors) and
IETF "HyperText Markup Language" (HTML, [RFC1866] and successors).
Traditionally, digitization had only "incidential", but not
"intentional" relationship to energy consumption: If it saved energy,
this was not only not a target benefit, it was not even recognized as
one, until probably recently. Instead, the evolution was driven from
anything-but-energy benefits, but instead utility benefits such as
improved speed, functionality/flexibility, accessibility, scalability
and reduced cost.
In hindsight though, digitization through IETF technologies and
specifically the Internet will likely have the largest contribution
to energy saving amonst all the possible categories, but it is also
the hardest to pinpoint on any specific technology/RFC. Instead, it
is often a combination of the whole stack of deployed protocols and
operational practices that contributes to energy saving through
digitization. It is likely also the biggest overall energy saving
impact of all possible categories that relate IETF work to energy:
The Internet as well as all other TCP/IP networks are likely the
biggest energy saving development of the past few decades if only the
energy consumption of equivalent services is compared. On the other
hand, they are also the cause for the biggest new type of new energy
consumption because of all the new services introduced in the past
decades with the Internet and the hyper-scaling that the Internet
affords them.
2.2. Energy saving through scale
Eckert Expires 22 December 2022 [Page 4]
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2.2.1. An example: Telephony
In most cases, energy saving through the use of IETF protocols
compared to earlier (digitized or non digitized) solutions is purely
a result of the reduction in the energy cost per bit over the decades
in networking. For example, the energy consumption of digital voice
telephony through the IETF "Session Initiation Protocol" (SIP,
[RFC2543] and successors) can easily be assumed to be more energy
efficient on a per voice-minute basis than prior voice technologies
such as analog or digital "Time Division Multiplex" (TDM) telephony
solely because of this evolution in mostly device as well as
physical-layer and link-layer networking technologies.
2.2.2. The packet multiplexing principle
Nevertheless, it is at the heart of the packet multiplexing model
employed by the IETF networking protocols IP ([RFC791]) and IPv6
([RFC1883] and successors) to successfully support this scaling that
brough down the cost per bit through ever faster links and network
nodes, especially for networks larger than building scale networks.
While the IETF protocols have not been the first or over their early
decades necessarily the most widely deployed packet networking
protocols, they where the ones who at least during the 1990th started
to break away from other protocols both in scale of deployment, as
well as in development of further technologies to support this
scaling.
2.2.3. End-to-end transport
At the core of scalability, even up to now, is the lightweight per-
packet-processing enabled through end-to-end congestion loss
management architecture as emobodied through the IETF "Transport
Control Protocol" (TCP, [RFC793] and successors). This model
eliminated more expensive per-hop, per-packet processing, such as
would be required for reliable hop-by-hop forwarding through per-hop
ARQ, which was key to scaling routers cost effectively.
2.2.4. Internet routing architecture
The meshed peer-to-peer and transitive routing of the Internet
enabled through the IETF "Border Gateway (Routing) Protocol (BGP,
[RFC4271] as well as predecessors) is another key factor to
successful scalability, because it enabled competitive market forces
to explore markets quickly. Prior to the Internet, the public often
only had access to highly regulated international networking
connections through often per-country monopoly regulated data
networks.
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2.2.5. Freedom to innovate
(non-IP) networks often also did not allow as much "freedom-to-
innovate" (as it is often called in the IETF) for applications
running over it. Instead those networks where exploring the coupling
of packet transport with higher layer services to allow the network
operator some degree of revenue sharing with the services running on
top of it, resulting not only in higher cost of those services but
also preferential and often exclusionary treatment of network traffic
not fitting the perceived highest revenue service options.
2.2.6. End-to-end encryption
When the same business practices where applied to IP network, it was
one of the key factors leading to the development of IETF end-to-end
encryption though protocols such as "Transport Layer Security" (TLS,
[RFC2246] and its successors). This further strengthened the ability
to scale service/applications at minimum additional cost for the
underlying packet transport, arguably driving innvoation into ever
faster networking technology and likely lower cost per bit.
2.2.7. Converged networks
Another key factor to support scaling where IETF technologies that
allowed to multiplex different types of traffic (such as "Voice,
Video and Data") which previously used/required separate networks
with typically incompatible networking technologies.
Eliminating multiple physical networks with separate routing/
forwarding nodes and separate links affords significant energy
savings even at the same generation of speed and hence energy/bit
simply by avoiding the N-fold production and operations of equipment
and links. Of course, originally the CAPEX and OPEX of multiple,
technology-diverse networks and host-stacks was the core reason for
unified networks, and energy saving is in hindsight just incidental
(as for all other cases mentioned here).
2.2.7.1. IntServ and DetNet
The first (non-IETF) wider adopted technology promising converged
networks was "Asynchronuous Transfer Mode" (ATM), which was designed
and deployed at the end of the 1980th to support specifically
multiplexing of "Data Voice and Video", where both Voice and Video
(at that time) required loss-free deterministic bounded latency and
low-jitter and had therefore their own Time-Division-Multiplex (TDM)
networks, both separate from so-called Data networks using packet
multiplexing. This technology was very expensive on a per-bit basis
due to its cell-forwarding nature though.
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At the end of the 1980th, it was proven (TBD: need to find the
reference, cedric knows..) that variable length packet multiplexing
in network can also support non-NP-hard calculations for bounded
latency. This lead to the IETF "Integrated Services WG" (INTSERV) to
support such guaranteed throughput and bounded latency traffic via
[RFC2212] - and to the demise of ATM.
IntServ has so far seen little traction because it too got
superceeded as explained in the following section - for its original
use-cases (voice and video). However this type of services are being
revisited for a broader set of use-cases [RFC8575] in the DetNet WG,
which should enable even further network infrastructure convergence
for IoT and industrial markets.
2.2.7.2. DiffServ
Due to the much higher per-packet processing overhead of INSERV
versus standard (so-called Best-Effort) Internet traffic, the INTSERV
model was already recognized in the 1990th to not support highest-
scale at lowest cost, leading to the parallel development of the IETF
"Differentated Services WG" (DIFFSERV) model defined in [RFC2475].
This has since then become the dominant technology to support
multiplexing of applications and services originally not designed for
the Internet onto a common TCP/IP network infrastructure,
specifically for voice and video over UDP ([RFC768]) including RTP
[RFC3550] and SIP.
2.2.7.3. SIP
SIP has most notably in the past two decades eliminated additional
network infrastructures previously required for (voice) telephony
services starting in the early 2000 with commercial/enterprise
deployments and today by removing even the option for any (non-IP/
SIP) analog or digital (ISDN) telephone service connection, instead
delivering those purely as services over adaptation interfaces on
home routers (TBD: Any RFC to cite for those tunneling/adaptation
services ?).
3. Higher or new energy consumption
Digitized, network centric workflows may consume more energy than
their non-digitized counterpart, as may new network centric worklows
without easy to compare prior workflows.
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In one type of instances, the energy consumption on a per-instance
basis is lower than in the non-digitized/non-Internet-digitized case,
but the total number of instances that are (Internet)-digitzed is
orders of magnituedes larger than their alternative options,
typically because of their higher utility or lower overall cost.
For example, each instance of (simple text) email consumes less
energy than sending a letter or postcard. Even streaming a movie or
TV series consumes less energy than renting a DVD DVDvsStreaming
(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/streaming-movie-less-
energy-dvd-180951586). Nevertheless, the total amount of instances
and in result energy consumption for email and streaming easily
outranks their predecessor technologies.
While these instances look beneficial from a simple energy
consumption metric, its overall scale and the resulting energy
consumption may in itself become an issue, especially when the energy
demand it creates risks to outstrip the possible energy production,
short term or long term. This concern is nowadays often raised
against the "digital economy", where the network energy consumption
is typically cited as a small contributor relative to its
applications, such as what is running in Data Centers (DC).
In other cases, the energy consumption of digitization requires often
significantly more than their pre-digitization alternatives. The
most well-known example of this are likely crypto-currencies based on
"proof-of-work" computations (mining), which on a per currency value
unit can cost 10..30 times or more of the energy consumed by for
example gold mining (very much depending on the highly fluctuating
price of the crypto-currency). Nevertheless, its overall utility
compared to such prior currencies or valuables makes it highly
successful in the market.
In general, the digital economy tends to be more energy intensive on
a per utility/value unit, for example by replacing a lot of manual
labor with computation), and/or it allows for faster growth of its
workflows.
The lower the cost of network traffic, and the more easily accessible
everywhere network connectivity is, the more competitive and/or
successful most of these new workflows of the digital economy can be.
Given how TCP/IP based networks, especially the Internet have
excelled through their design principles (and success) in this
reduction of network traffic cost and ubiquitous access over the past
few decades, as outlined above, one can say that IETF technologies
and especially the Internet are the most important enabler of the
digital economy, and the energy consumption it produces.
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4. Sustainability
Sustainability is the principle to utilize resources in a way that
they do not diminish or run out over the long term. Beyond the above
covered energy saving, sustainability relates with respect to the
IETF specifically to the use of renewable sources of energy to
minimize exhaustion of fossile resources, and the impact of IETF
technologies on global warming to avoid worsening living conditions
on the planet.
While there seems to be no IETF work specifically intending to target
sustainability (TBD: did we miss anything ?), the Internet itself can
similarily to how it does for digitization play a key role in
building sustainable networked IT infrastructures. The following
subsections list three examples areas where global high performance,
low cost Internet networking is a key requirement.
4.1. Follow the energy cloud scheduling
Renewable energy resources (except for water) do commonly have
fluctuating energy output. For example, solar energy output
correlates to night/day and strength of sunlight. Cloud Data Centers
(DC) consume a significant amount of the IT sectors energy. Some
workloads may simply be scheduled to consume energy in accordance
with the amount of available renewable energy at the time, not
requiring the network. Significant workloads are not elastic in
time, such as interactive cloud DC interactive work (cloud based
applications) or entertainment (gaming etc.). These workloads may be
instantiated or even dynamically (over time) migrate to a DC location
with sufficient renewable energy and the Internet (or large TCP/IP
OTT backbone networks) will serve as the fabric to access the remote
DC and to coordinate the instantiation/migration.
4.2. Minimize generated heat
The mayority of energy in cloud DC is normally also wasted as exhaust
heat, requiring even more energy for cooling. The warmer the
location, the more energy needs to be spent for cooling. For this
reason, DC in cooler climates such as https://greenmountain.no/power-
and-cooling/ can help to reduce the overall DC energy consumption
significantly (independent of the energy being consumed in the DC to
be renewable itself). The Internet again plays the role of providing
access to those type of DC whole location is not optimized for
consumption but for sustainable generation of compute and storage.
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4.3. Heat recovery
Exhaust heat, especially from compute in DC, can be recovered when it
is coupled to heating systems ranging in size all the way from
individual familys home through larger buildings (hotels etc.) all
the way to district heating systems. A provider of such type of
compute-generated heat as a service can sell the compute capacity as
long as there is cost efficient network connectivity. "Cloud & Heat"
is an example company offering such infrastructures and services
https://www.cloudandheat.com/wp-content/
uploads/2020/02/2020_CloudHeat-Whitepaper-Cost-saving-Potential.pdf.
4.4. Telecollaboration
Telecollaboration has a long history in the IETF resulting in
multiple core technologies over the decades.
If one considers textual communications via email and netwnews (using
e.g.: NNTP) as early forms of Telecollaboration, then
telecollaboration history through IETF technology reaches back into
the 1980th and earlier.
Around 1990, the IETF work on IP Multicast (e.g.[RFC1112] and later)
enabled the first efficient forms of audio/video group collaboration
through an overlay network over the Internet called the MBone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone which was also used by the IETF
for more than a decade to provide remote collaboration for its own
(in-person + remote participation) meetings.
With the advent of SIP in the early 2000, commercial
telecollaboration started to be built most often on SIP based session
and application protocols with multiple IETF working groups
contributing to that protocol suite (TBD: how much more example/
details should we have here). Using this technology and the
Internet, the immersive nature of telecollaboration was brought to
life-size video, was/is called Telepresence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepresence and later to even more
immersive forms such as AR/VR telecollaboration.
In 2011, the IETF opened the "Real-Time Communication in WEB-
browsers" (RTCWEB) WG, that towards the end of that decade became the
most widely supported cross-platform standard for hundreds of
commercial and free tele-collaboration solutions, including Cisco
Webex, which is also used by the IETF itself, Zoom and the new IETF
collaboration suite MeetEcho (TBD: good references here ?).
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While the various forms of Telecollaboration are mostly instances of
digitization, they are discussed under sustainability because of its
comparison to in-person travel that is not based on simple comparison
of energy, but nowadays by comparing their impact on global warming,
a key fator to sustainability.
Telecollaboration was primarily developed because of the utility for
the participants - to avoid travel for originally predominantly
business communications/collaborations. It saw an extreme increase
in use (TBD: references) in the Corona Crisis of 2019, when
especially international travel was often prohibited, and often even
working from an office. This forced millions of people to work from
home and utilizing commercial telecollaboration tools. It equally
caused most in-person events that where not cancelled to be moved to
a telecollaboration platform over the Internet - most of them likely
relying on RTCWEB protocols.
Actual energy consumption related comparison between teleconferencing
and in-person travel is complex but since the last decades is
commonly based on calculating some form of CO2 emission equivalent of
the energy consumed, hence comparing not simply the energy
consumption, but weighing it by the impact the energy consumption has
on one of the key factors (CO2 emission) known to impact sustainable
living conditions.
[VC2014] is a good example of a comparison between travel and
telecollaboration taking various factors into account and using CO2
emission equivalents as its core metric. That paper concludes that
carbon/ energy cost of telecollaboration could be as little as 7% of
an in-person meeting. in-person meeting. Those numbers have various
assumptions and change when time-effort of participants is converted
to carbon/energy costs. These numbers should even be better today in
favor of telecollaboration: cost of Internet traffic/bit goes down
while cost of fossile fuel for travel goes up.
Recently, air travel has also come under more scrutiny because the
greenhouse gas emissions of air travel at the altitudes used by
commercial aviation has been calculated to have a higher global
warming impact than simply the amount of CO2 used by the air plane if
it was exhausted at surface level. One publically funded
organization offering carbon offset services calculates a factor 3 of
the CO2 consumption of an air plane
https://www.atmosfair.de/de/fliegen_und_klima/flugverkehr_und_klima/
klimawirkung_flugverkehr/.
In summary: Telecollaboration has a higher sustainability benefit
compared to travel than just the comparison of energy consumption
because of the higher challenge to use renewable energy in
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transportation than in networking, and this is most extreme in the
case of telecollaboration that replaces air travel because of the
even higher global warming impact of using fossile fuels in air
travel.
5. Energy saving in networks and nodes
5.1. Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN)
Low Power and Lossy Networks are networks in which nodes and/or radio
links have constraints. Low poer consumption constraints in nodes
often originate from the need to operate nodes from as long as
possible from battery and/or energy harvesting such as (today most
commonly) solar panels associated with the node or ambient energy
such as energy harvesting from movement for wearable nodes or piezo
cells to generate energy for mechanically operated nodes such as
switches.
Several IETF WGs have or are producing work is primarily intended wo
support LLN through multiple layers of the protocol stack. [RFC8352]
gives a good overview of the energy consumption related communication
challenges and solutions produced by the IETF for this space.
To minimize the energy needs for such nodes, their network data-
processing mechanisms have to be optimized. This includes packet
header compression, fragmentation (to avoid latency through large
packets at low bitrates, packet bundling to only consume radio
engergy at short time periods, radio energy tuning to just reach the
destination(s), minimization of of multicasting to eliminate need of
radio receivers to consume energy and so on. [RFC8352] gives a more
detailled overview, especially because different L2 technologies such
as IEEE 802.15.4 type (low power) wireless networks, Bluetooth Low
Energy (BLE), WiFi (IEEE 802.11) and DEC ULE.
In the INTernet area of the IETF, several LLN specific WGs exist(ed):
5.1.1. 6LOWPAN WG
The "IPv6 over Low power WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Networks)"
(6lowpan) WG ran from 2005 to 2014 and produced 6 RFC that adopt IPv6
to IEEE 802.15.4 type (low power) wireless networks by transmission
procedures [RFC4949], compression of IPv6 (and transport) packet
headers [RFC6282], modifications for neighbor discovery (ND)
[RFC6775] , as well as 3 informational RFCs about the WPAN space and
applying IPv6 to it. "Transmission of IPv6 Packets over IEEE
802.15.4 Networks" [RFC4944], "Compression Format for IPv6 Datagrams
over IEEE 802.15.4-Based Networks" [RFC6282], "Neighbor Discovery
Optimization for IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks
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(6LoWPANs)" [RFC6775] (6LOWPAN-ND).
5.1.2. LPWAN WG
Since 2014, the "IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks" (LPWAN) WG
has produced 4 RFC for low-power wide area networks, such as LoRaWAN
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa, with three standards, [RFC8724],
[RFC8824], [RFC9011].
5.1.3. 6TISCH WG
Since 2013, the "IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e" (6tisch)
WG has produced 7 RFC for a version of 802.15.4 called the "Time-
Slotted Channel Hopping Mode" (TSCH), which supports deterministic
latency and lower energy consumption through the use of scheduling
traffic into well defined time slots, thereby also optimizing/
minimizing energy consumption when compared to 802.15.4 without TSCH.
5.1.4. 6LO WG
Since 2013, the "IPv6 over Networks of Resource-constrained Nodes"
(6lo) WG has generalized the work of 6lowpan for LLN in general,
producing 17 RFC for IPv6-over-l2foo adaptation layer specifications,
information models, cross-adaptation layer specification (such as
header specifications) and maintenance and informational documents
for other pre-existing IETF work in this space.
5.1.5. ROLL WG
In the RouTinG (RTG) area of the IETF, the "Routing Over Low power
and Lossy networks" (ROLL) WG has produced since 2008 23 RFC.
Initially it produced requirement RFCs of different type of "Low-
power and Lossy Networks": urban: [RFC5548], industrial [RFC5673],
home automation [RFC5826] and building automation [RFC5867].
Since then its work is mostly focussed on the "IPv6 Routing Protocol
for Low-Power and Lossy Networks" (RPL) [RFC6550], which is used in a
wide variety of the above described IPv6 instances of LLN networks
and which are discussed in two ROLL applicability statement RFCs,
"Applicability Statement: The Use of the Routing Protocol for Low-
Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) Protocol Suite in Home Automation and
Building Control" [RFC7733] and "Applicability Statement for the
Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) in Advanced
Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Networks" [RFC8036].
The ROLL WG also wrote a more generic RFC for LLN, "Terms Used in
Routing for Low-Power and Lossy Networks" [RFC7102]. RPL has a
highly configurable set of functions to support (energy) constrained
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networks. Unconstrained root node(s), typically edge routers between
the RPL network and a backbone network calculate "Destination-
Oriented Directed Acyclic Graphs" (DODAG) and can use strict hop-by-
hop source routing with dedicated IPv6 routing headers [RFC9008] to
minimize constrained nodes routing related compute and memory
requirements. "The Trickle Algorithm" [RFC6206] allows to minimize
routing related packets through automatic lazy updates. While RPL is
naturally a mesh network routing protocol, where all nodes are
usually expected to be able to participate in it, RPL also supports
even more lightweight leave nodes [RFC9010].
The 2013 [I-D.ajunior-energy-awareness-00] proposes the introducing
of energy related parameters into RPL to support calculation/
selection of most energy efficient paths. The 2017 "An energy
optimization routing scheme for LLSs",
[I-D.wang-roll-energy-optimization-scheme] observed that DODAGs in
RPL tend to require more energy in nodes closer to the root and
proposed specific optimizations to reduce this problem. Neither of
these drafts proceeded in the IETF.
While original use-cases for RPL where energy and size limited
networks, its design is to a large extend not scale limited. Because
of this, and due to its reduced compute/memory requirements for the
same size networks compared to other routing protocols, especially
the so-called link-state "Interior Gateway routing Protocols" (IGP),
such as most commonly used protocols ISIS [RFC1142] and OSPF
[RFC2328], RPL has also proliferated into use-cases for non-
constrained networks, for example to support the largest possible
networks automatically, such as in [RFC8994].
5.2. Constrained Nodes and Networks
(Power) constrained nodes and/or networks exist in a much broader
variety than coupled with low-power and lossy networks. For example
WiFi and mobile network connections are not considered to be lossy
networks, and personal mobile nodes with either connections are order
of magnitude less constrained than nodes typically attached to LLN
network. Therefore, broader work in the IETF than focussed primarily
on LLN typically uses just the term light-weight or constrained
(nodes and networks).
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5.2.1. LWIG WG
Since 2013, the "Light-Weight Implementation Guidance" (lwig) WG is
has produced 6 informational RFC on the groups subject, much of which
indirectly supports implementing power efficient network
implementations via lightweight nodes/links, but it also addressed
the topic explicitly including via the aforementioned [RFC8352] and
[RFC9178], "Building Power-Efficient Constrained Application Protocol
(CoAP) Devices for Cellular Networks".
5.2.2. CORE and CoAP
In the APPlication (APP) area of the IETF, the "Constrained RESTful
Environments" (core) WG has produced since 2010 21 RFC, most of them
for or related to "The Constrained Application Protocol" (CoAP)
[RFC6690], which can best be described as a replacement for HTTP for
constrained environment, using UDP instead of TCP and DTLS instead of
TLS, compact binary message formats instead of human readible textual
formats, RESTful message exchange semantic instead of a broader set
of options (in HTTP), but also more functionality such as (multicast)
discovery and directory services, therefore providing a more
comprehensive set of common application functions with more compact
on-the-wire/radio encoding than its unconstrained alternatives.
"Object Security for Constrained RESTful Environments" (OSCORE),
[RFC8613] is a further product of the CoRE WG providing a more
message layer based, more lightweight security alternative to DTLS.
While originally designed for LLN, CoAP is transcending LLN and
equally becoming standards in unconstrained environments such as
wired/ethernet industrial Machine 2 Machine (M2M) communications,
because of simplicity, flexibility and relying on the single set of
protocols supporting the widest range of deployment scenarios.
In the SECurity (SEC) area of the IETF, the "Authentication and
Authorization for Constrained Environments" (ace) working group has
since 2014 produced 4 RFC for security functions in constrained
environments, for example CoAP based variations of prior HTTPS
protocols such as EST-coaps [RFC9148] for HTTPS based EST [RFC7030].
Constrained node support in cryptography especially entails support
for Elliptic Curve (EC) public keys due to their shorter key sizes
and lower compute requirements compared to RSA public keys with same
cryptographic strength. While the benefits of EC over RSA where
making them preferred, this "additional market space" (constrained
node) benefit helped in their faster market proliferation even beyond
constrained networks.
5.3. Selected cross-WG technologies
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5.3.1. (IP) Multicast
5.3.1.1. Power saving with multicast
IP Multicast was introduced with [RFC1112] and today also called "Any
Source Multicast" (ASM) has various protocols standardized in the
IETF across multiple working groups. There are also MPLS and BIER
multicast protocols from the IETF developed in the equally named WGs.
These three, network layer multicast technologies can be a power
saving technologies when used to distribute data because they reduce
the number of packets that need to be sent across the network
(through in-network-replication where needed). Because most current
link and router technologies do not allow to actually save
significant amounts of energy on lower than maximum utilization,
these benefits are often only theoretical though. Software routers
are the ones most likely to expose energy consumption somwhat
proportional to their throughput for just the forwarding (CPU) chip.
Likewise, in large backbone networks, IP multicast can free up
bandwidth to be used for other traffic, such as unicast traffic,
which may allow to avoid upgrades to faster and potentially more
power consuming routers/links. Today, these benefits too are most
often overcompensated for by lower per-bit energy consumption of
newer generations of routers and links though.
Multicasting can also save energy on the transmitting station across
radio links, compared to replicated unicast traffic, but this is
rarely significant, because except for fully battery powered mesh
network, there are typically non-energy-constrained nodes, such as
(commonly) the wired access-points in WiFi networks.
In result, today multicasting has typically no significant power
saving benefits with available network technologies. Instead it is
used (for data distribution) when the amount of traffic that a
unicast solution alternatice (with so-called ingres replication) is
not possible due to the total amount of traffic generated. This
includes wireless/radio networks, where equally airtime is the
limiting factor.
5.3.1.2. Power waste through multicast based service coordination
(IP) multicast is often not used to distribute data requested by
receivers, but also coordination type functions such as service or
resource announcement, discovery or selection. These multicast
messages may not carry a lot of data, but they cause recurring, often
periodic packets to be sent across a domain and waste energy because
of various ill advised designs, including, but not limited to the
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following issues:
(a) The receivers of such packets may not even need to receive them,
but the protocol shares a multicast group with another protocol that
the client does need to receive.
(b) The receiver should not need to receive the packet as far as
multicast is concerned, but the underlying link-layer technology
still makes the receiver consume the packet at link-layer.
(c) The information received is not new, but just periodically
refreshed.
(d) The packet was originated for a service selection by a client,
and the receiving device is even responding, but the client then
chooses to select another device for the service/resource.
These problems are specifically problematic in the presence of so-
called "sleepy" nodes Section 5.3.2 that need to wake up to receive
such packets (unnecessarily). It is worse, when the network itself
is an LLN network where the forwarders themselves are power
constrained and for example periodic multicasting of such
coordination packets wastes energy on those forwaders as well -
compared to better alternatives.
In 2006, the IETF standardized "Source Specific Multicast" (SSM)
[RFC4607], a variation of IP Multicast that does not allow to perform
these type of coordination functions but is only meant for (and
useable for) actual data distribution. SSM was introduced for other
reasons than the above described power related issues though, but
deprecating the use of ASM is one way to avoid/minimize its ill-
advised use with these type of coordination functions, when energy
efficiency is an issue. [RFC8815] is an example for deprecating ASM
for other reasons in Service Provider networks.
5.3.1.3. Multicast problems with WiFi
[RFC9119] covers multicast challenges and solution (proposals) for IP
Multicast over WiFi. With respect to power consumption, it discusses
the following aspects.
(a) Unnecessary wake-up of power constrained WiFi Stations (STA)
nodes can be minimized by wireless Access Points (APs) that buffer
multicast packets so they are sent only periodically when those nodes
wake up.
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(b) WiFi access points with "Multiple Input Multiple Output" (MIMO)
antenna diversity focus sent packets in a way that they are not
"broadcast" to all receivers within a particular maximum distance
from the AP, making WiFi multicast transmission even less desirable.
(c) It lists the most widely deployed protocols using aforementioned
coordination via IP multicast and describes their specific challenges
and possible improvements.
(d) Existing proprietary conversion of WiFi multicast to WiFi unicast
packets.
5.3.2. Sleepy nodes
Sleepy nodes are one of the most common design solutions in support
of power saving. This includes LLN level constrained nodes, but also
nodes with significant battery capacity, such as mobile phones,
tablets and notebooks, because battery lifetime has long since been a
key selling factor. In result, vendors do attempt to optimize power
consumption across all hardware and software components of such
nodes, including the interface hardware and protocols used across the
nodes WiFi and mobile radios.
Restating from [I-D.bormann-core-roadmap-05]: CoAP has basic support
for sleepy nodes by allowing caching of resource information in (non-
sleepy) proxy nodes. [RFC7641] enhances this support by enabling
sleepy nodes to update caching intermediaries on their own schedule.
Around 2012/2013, there was significant review of further review of
further support for sleepy nodes in CoAP, resulting in a long list of
drafts, whose sleepy nodes benefits are discussed in
[I-D.bormann-core-roadmap-05]: [I-D.vial-core-mirror-server],
[I-D.vial-core-mirror-proxy], [I-D.fossati-core-publish-option],
[I-D.giacomin-core-sleepy-option], [I-D.castellani-core-alive],
[I-D.rahman-core-sleepy-problem-statement], [I-D.rahman-core-sleepy],
[I-D.rahman-core-sleepy-nodes-do-we-need],
[I-D.fossati-core-monitor-option]. None of these drafts proceeded
though.
One partial solution to some sleepy node issues related to their
energy consumption, especially the ones caused by the use of
multicast Section 5.3.1.2, Section 5.3.1.3 is the use of the
"Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) Resource Directory" (CoRE-
RD) [RFC9176]. It allows for sleepy nodes to register discover and
register resources via unicast and avoids waking up sleepy nodes when