Day 1 / Track 3 / Talk 1 Workshop: Workshop on IoT related MAC layers, header compressions and routing protocols Chair: Stefan Schmidt Report by: Rahul Jadhav and Stefan Schmidt
The support of IoT related protocols and technologies has never been the hottest topic at NetDev conferences. With the ongoing workshop series we try to engage more with the wider community and communicate our needs.
The first session was on the CAN subsystem, its current status and the addition of J1939. One of the problems they have been fighting with lately was the packet scheduler selected by systemd which lead to packet drops with no notification to sender.
The second session targeted a userspace API for the kernel header compression subsystem (6lowpan). After a quick intro the discussion the focus shifted on the questions such as where to store the data (some needed per peer, some per network, some contain L2 info, some L3). Most likely some the required data would need to be split sensible and added to the correct parts in the stack. Having one data structure catching it all (+link health metrics) would not work.
In the third session there was input from the userspace side with a RPL implementation using the Linux ieee802154 and 6lo subsystems. One of their biggest pain points is the missing quality metrics to factor into their routing decisions. This is something the ieee802154 developers will need to work on.
The last session was a talk on U-LPWA technologies. A lot work is in progress in this area with LoRa being the furthest ahead. After an explanatory talk and status update various topics how to progress further have been discussed. Leaving out some extra hardware capabilities, not needed for the standard to work, will help to speed up the process. Best ways to split the different layers of LoRa up on the kernel side was another topic.