Essay Style Document Writeup
1. Summary
Who is the document shepherd? Who is the responsible Area Director?
The document shepherd is ROLL co-chair, Michael Richardson.
The responsible AD is Alvaro Retano.
This is a standards track document in fullfilment of a charter item
to explain how to use RPL in Advanced Metering Infrastructure networks.
The document follows the template:
draft-ietf-roll-applicability-template-08
which underwent a WG consensus call, and has previously been reviewed
by the SecDir.
The Applicability document series from the ROLL WG collects a series of
operational and security options into a single place, picking specific
items from a the palette of options provided in RFC6550.
The abstract is:
This document discusses the applicability of RPL in Advanced Metering
Infrastructure (AMI) networks.
While in some cases applicability statements in other WG have been
published as BCP or Informational, the applicability statements from the
ROLL WG are in essence industry specific profiles of IETF Standards.
Standards Track is appropriate for these specifications; they are intended to
be used as part of procurement and compliance work.
2. Review and Consensus
The applicability statement series from the ROLL WG tends to involve small
subsets of the WG, as there are typically few members of the WG who are
involved in a specific industry. The industries represented by this
document are new to the IETF process; the document has taken a long time to
be produced and reviewed by the industry involved as this industry is
used to closed proprietary verticals, is not used to collaborating (in
public) with competitors.
The move to a new document editor was required to close certain issues, and
finalize the document.
The shepherd observes the participants involved are representative of
much internal review that occured in this sector.
The document had an early SecDir review, along with a SecDir review team
review that was done to the template. WG reviews pointed to situations where
there was "fence-sitting" -- an unwillingness to make a choice between
storing and non-storing mode for instance -- and pushed for some specific
choice to be made. Often this fence-sitting was the result of attempting to
be too inclusive in scope, and a reduction in scope was accomplished.
3. Intellectual Property
There have been no IPRs claims against the document, and authors have been
complied with BCP 78 and 79.
4. Other Points
The downrefs are to Information RFCs produced by the WG as requirements
documents, and are appropriate.
There are no IANA considerations.
This document has been around for a very long time, and has suffered at times
from "absenttee-landlords" --- authors who have changed jobs, or job
priorities.
The AMI industry has historically been a vertical with utilities procuring
specific devices for their "plant" with little thought to second sources or
interoperability. Further, the utilities have expertise to install and
manage their networks: this includes being able to plug cables (such as JTAG
cables) into devices in order to provision layer-2 keys.
As such, standardized automatic key management facilities are not at present
interesting to these industries. While this is unfortunate, the document is
pretty clear about what layer-2 facilities are to be used.
The document has been through IDnits.