Internet-Draft fragment forwarding November 2019
Watteyne, et al. Expires 31 May 2020 [Page]
Intended Status:
Standards Track
T. Watteyne, Ed.
Analog Devices
P. Thubert, Ed.
Cisco Systems
C. Bormann
Universitaet Bremen TZI

On Forwarding 6LoWPAN Fragments over a Multihop IPv6 Network


This document introduces the capability to forward 6LoWPAN fragments. This method reduces the latency and increases end-to-end reliability in route-over forwarding. It is the companion to using virtual reassembly buffers which is a pure implementation technique.

Status of This Memo




This Internet-Draft will expire on 31 May 2020.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

The original 6LoWPAN fragmentation is defined in [RFC4944] and it is implicitly defined for use over a single IP hop through possibly multiple Layer-2 (mesh-under) hops in a meshed 6LoWPAN Network. Although [RFC6282] updates [RFC4944], it does not redefine 6LoWPAN fragmentation.

This means that over a Layer-3 (route-over) network, an IP packet is expected to be reassembled at every hop at the 6LoWPAN sublayer, pushed to Layer-3 to be routed, and then fragmented again if the next hop is another similar 6LoWPAN link. This draft introduces an alternate approach called 6LoWPAN Fragment Forwarding (FF) whereby an intermediate node forwards a fragment as soon as it is received if the next hop is a similar 6LoWPAN link. The routing decision is made on the first fragment, which has all the IPv6 routing information. The first fragment is forwarded immediately and a state is stored to enable forwarding the next fragments along the same path.

Done right, 6LoWPAN Fragment Forwarding techniques lead to more streamlined operations, less buffer bloat and lower latency. It may be wasteful if some fragments are missing after the first one since the first fragment will still continue till the 6LoWPAN endpoint that will attempt to perform the reassembly, and may be misused to the point that performances fall behind that of per-hop recomposition. This specification provides a generic overview of FF, discusses advantages and caveats, and introduces a particular 6LoWPAN Fragment Forwarding technique called Virtual Reassembly Buffer that can be used while conserving the message formats defined in [RFC4944].

2. Terminology

2.1. BCP 14


2.2. Referenced Work

Past experience with fragmentation has shown that misassociated or lost fragments can lead to poor network behavior and, occasionally, trouble at application layer. The reader is encouraged to read "IPv4 Reassembly Errors at High Data Rates" [RFC4963] and follow the references for more information. That experience led to the definition of "Path MTU discovery" [RFC8201] (PMTUD) protocol that limits fragmentation over the Internet.

"IP Fragmentation Considered Fragile" [FRAG-ILE] discusses security threats that are linked to using IP fragmentation. The 6LoWPAN fragmentation takes place underneath, but some issues described there may still apply to 6LoWPAN fragments.

Readers are expected to be familiar with all the terms and concepts that are discussed in "IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs): Overview, Assumptions, Problem Statement, and Goals" [RFC4919] and "Transmission of IPv6 Packets over IEEE 802.15.4 Networks" [RFC4944].


2.3. New Terms

This specification uses the following terms:

6LoWPAN endpoints:
Compressed Form:
This specification uses the generic term Compressed Form to refer to the format of a datagram after the action of [RFC6282] and possibly [RFC8138] for RPL [RFC6550] artifacts.

3. Overview of 6LoWPAN Fragmentation

We use Figure 1 to illustrate 6LoWPAN fragmentation. We assume node A forwards a packet to node B, possibly as part of a multi-hop route between IPv6 source and destination nodes which are neither A nor B.

               +---+                     +---+
        ... ---| A |-------------------->| B |--- ...
               +---+                     +---+
                              # (frag. 5)

             123456789                 123456789
            |   #  ###|               |###  #   |
               outgoing                incoming
          fragmentation                reassembly
                 buffer                buffer
Figure 1: Fragmentation at node A, reassembly at node B.

Node A starts by compacting the IPv6 packet using the header compression mechanism defined in [RFC6282]. If the resulting 6LoWPAN packet does not fit into a single Link-Layer frame, node A's 6LoWPAN sublayer cuts it into multiple 6LoWPAN fragments, which it transmits as separate Link-Layer frames to node B. Node B's 6LoWPAN sublayer reassembles these fragments, inflates the compressed header fields back to the original IPv6 header, and hands over the full IPv6 packet to its IPv6 layer.

In Figure 1, a packet forwarded by node A to node B is cut into nine fragments, numbered 1 to 9 as follows:

The reassembly buffer for 6LoWPAN is indexed in node B by:

Because it may be hard for node B to correlate all possible Link-Layer addresses that node A may use (e.g., short vs. long addresses), node A must use the same Link-Layer address to send all the fragments of the same datagram to node B.

Conceptually, the reassembly buffer in node B contains:

A fragmentation header is added to each fragment; it indicates what portion of the packet that fragment corresponds to. Section 5.3 of [RFC4944] defines the format of the header for the first and subsequent fragments. All fragments are tagged with a 16-bit "datagram_tag", used to identify which packet each fragment belongs to. Each datagram can be uniquely identified by the sender Link-Layer addresses of the frame that carries it and the datagram_tag that the sender allocated for this datagram. [RFC4944] also mandates that the first fragment is sent first and with a particular format that is different than that of the next fragments. Each fragment but the first one can be identified within its datagram by the datagram-offset.

Node B's typical behavior, per [RFC4944], is as follows. Upon receiving a fragment from node A with a datagram_tag previously unseen from node A, node B allocates a buffer large enough to hold the entire packet. The length of the packet is indicated in each fragment (the datagram_size field), so node B can allocate the buffer even if the first fragment it receives is not fragment 1. As fragments come in, node B fills the buffer. When all fragments have been received, node B inflates the compressed header fields into an IPv6 header, and hands the resulting IPv6 packet to the IPv6 layer which performs the route lookup. This behavior typically results in per-hop fragmentation and reassembly. That is, the packet is fully reassembled, then (re)fragmented, at every hop.

4. Limits of Per-Hop Fragmentation and Reassembly

There are at least 2 limits to doing per-hop fragmentation and reassembly. See [ARTICLE] for detailed simulation results on both limits.

4.1. Latency

When reassembling, a node needs to wait for all the fragments to be received before being able to generate the IPv6 packet, and possibly forward it to the next hop. This repeats at every hop.

This may result in increased end-to-end latency compared to a case where each fragment is forwarded without per-hop reassembly.

4.2. Memory Management and Reliability

Constrained nodes have limited memory. Assuming a reassembly buffer for a 6LoWPAN MTU of 1280 bytes as defined in section 4 of [RFC4944], typical nodes only have enough memory for 1-3 reassembly buffers.

To illustrate this we use the topology from Figure 2, where nodes A, B, C and D all send packets through node E. We further assume that node E's memory can only hold 3 reassembly buffers.

               +---+       +---+
       ... --->| A |------>| B |
               +---+       +---+\
                                 +---+    +---+
                                 | E |--->| F | ...
                                 +---+    +---+
               +---+       +---+
       ... --->| C |------>| D |
               +---+       +---+
Figure 2: Illustrating the Memory Management Issue.

When nodes A, B and C concurrently send fragmented packets, all 3 reassembly buffers in node E are occupied. If, at that moment, node D also sends a fragmented packet, node E has no option but to drop one of the packets, lowering end-to-end reliability.

5. Forwarding Fragments

A 6LoWPAN Fragment Forwarding technique makes the routing decision on the first fragment, which is always the one with the IPv6 address of the destination. Upon a first fragment, a forwarding node (e.g. node B in a A->B->C sequence) that does fragment forwarding MUST attempt to create a state and forward the fragment. This is an atomic operation, and if the first fragment cannot be forwarded then the state MUST be removed. When a forwarding node receives a fragment other than a first fragment, it MUST look up state based on the source Link-Layer address and the datagram_tag in the received fragment. If no such state is found, the fragment MUST be dropped; otherwise the fragment MUST be forwarded using the information in the state found. Since the datagram_tag is uniquely associated to the source Link-Layer address of the fragment, the forwarding node MUST assign a new datagram_tag from its own namespace for the next hop and rewrite the fragment header of each fragment with that datagram_tag.

Compared to Section 3, the conceptual reassembly buffer in node B now contains, assuming that node B is neither the source nor the final destination:

A node that has not received the first fragment cannot forward the next fragments. This means that if node B receives a fragment, node A was in possession of the first fragment at some point. In order to keep the operation simple, it makes sense to be consistent with [RFC4944] and enforce that the first fragment is always sent first. When that is done, if node B receives a fragment that is not the first and for which it has no state, then node B treats this as an error and refrain from creating a state or attempting to forward. This also means that node A should perform all its possible retries on the first fragment before it attempts to send the next fragments, and that it should abort the datagram and release its state if it fails to send the first fragment.

One benefit of Fragment Forwarding is that the memory that is used to store the packet is now distributed along the path, which limits the buffer bloat effect. Multiple fragments may progress in parallel along the network as long as they do not interfere. An associated caveat is that on a half duplex radio, if node A sends the next fragment at the same time as node B forwards the previous fragment to a node C down the path then node B will miss the next fragment. If node C forwards the previous fragment to a node D at the same time and on the same frequency as node A sends the next fragment to node B, this may result in a hidden terminal problem at B whereby the transmission from C interferes with that from A unbeknownst of node A. It results that consecutive fragments must be reasonably spaced in order to avoid the 2 forms of collision described above. A node that has multiple packets or fragments to send via different next-hop routers may interleave the messages in order to alleviate those effects.

6. Virtual Reassembly Buffer (VRB) Implementation

Virtual Reassembly Buffer (VRB) is the implementation technique described in [LWIG-VRB] in which a forwarder does not reassemble each packet in its entirety before forwarding it.

VRB overcomes the limits listed in Section 4. Nodes do not wait for the last fragment before forwarding, reducing end-to-end latency. Similarly, the memory footprint of VRB is just the VRB table, reducing the packet drop probability significantly.

There are, however, limits:

Non-zero Packet Drop Probability:
The abstract data in a VRB table entry contains at a minimum the Link-Layer address of the predecessor and that of the successor, the datagram_tag used by the predecessor and the local datagram_tag that this node will swap with it. The VRB may need to store a few octets from the last fragment that may not have fit within MTU and that will be prepended to the next fragment. This yields a small footprint that is 2 orders of magnitude smaller compared to needing a 1280-byte reassembly buffer for each packet. Yet, the size of the VRB table necessarily remains finite. In the extreme case where a node is required to concurrently forward more packets that it has entries in its VRB table, packets are dropped.
No Fragment Recovery:
There is no mechanism in VRB for the node that reassembles a packet to request a single missing fragment. Dropping a fragment requires the whole packet to be resent. This causes unnecessary traffic, as fragments are forwarded even when the destination node can never construct the original IPv6 packet.
No Per-Fragment Routing:
All subsequent fragments follow the same sequence of hops from the source to the destination node as the first fragment, because the IP header is required to route the fragment and is only present in the first fragment. A side effect is that the first fragment must always be forwarded first.

The severity and occurrence of these limits depends on the Link-Layer used. Whether these limits are acceptable depends entirely on the requirements the application places on the network.

If the limits are present and not acceptable for the application, future specifications may define new protocols to overcome these limits. One example is [FRAG-RECOV] which defines a protocol which allows fragment recovery.

7. Security Considerations

Secure joining and the Link-Layer security that it sets up protects against those attacks from network outsiders.


8. IANA Considerations

No requests to IANA are made by this document.

9. Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Carles Gomez Montenegro, Yasuyuki Tanaka, Ines Robles and Dave Thaler for their in-depth review of this document and improvement suggestions. Also many thanks to Georgies Papadopoulos and Dominique Barthel for their own reviews.

10. Normative References

Bormann, C. and T. Watteyne, "Virtual reassembly buffers in 6LoWPAN", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-lwig-6lowpan-virtual-reassembly-01, , <>.
Thubert, P., "6LoWPAN Selective Fragment Recovery", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-6lo-fragment-recovery-07, , <>.

11. Informative References

Kushalnagar, N., Montenegro, G., and C. Schumacher, "IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs): Overview, Assumptions, Problem Statement, and Goals", RFC 4919, DOI 10.17487/RFC4919, , <>.
Heffner, J., Mathis, M., and B. Chandler, "IPv4 Reassembly Errors at High Data Rates", RFC 4963, DOI 10.17487/RFC4963, , <>.
Rosen, E., Viswanathan, A., and R. Callon, "Multiprotocol Label Switching Architecture", RFC 3031, DOI 10.17487/RFC3031, , <>.
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, , <>.
Bonica, R., Baker, F., Huston, G., Hinden, R., Troan, O., and F. Gont, "IP Fragmentation Considered Fragile", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile-17, , <>.
Tanaka, Y., Minet, P., and T. Watteyne, "6LoWPAN Fragment Forwarding", IEEE Communications Standards Magazine , .

Authors' Addresses

Thomas Watteyne (editor)
Analog Devices
32990 Alvarado-Niles Road, Suite 910
Union City, CA 94587
United States of America
Pascal Thubert (editor)
Cisco Systems, Inc
Building D, 45 Allee des Ormes - BP1200
06254 Mougins - Sophia Antipolis
Carsten Bormann
Universitaet Bremen TZI
Postfach 330440
D-28359 Bremen