Applications on wpan-linux

Applications on wpan-linux

[Xue Liu]

Hello,

I am working on 802.15.4 integration into OpenWRT/LEDE system. In
OpenWRT/LEDE man can build 802.11 wireless network with hostapd,
wpa_supplicant, netifd and LuCI interface, which I would like also to
do with 802.15.4. Thus I did similar things like iwpaninfo and adding
802.15.4 support to netifd. With these man can config 802.15.4
interfaces. Now I am looking for applications to build a 802.15.4
network like hostapd and wpa_supplicant. Can you give me some advises
? Thx.

Regards,

Xue Liu

Re: Applications on wpan-linux

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On 04/25/2017 12:00 PM, Xue Liu wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am working on 802.15.4 integration into OpenWRT/LEDE system. In
> OpenWRT/LEDE man can build 802.11 wireless network with hostapd,
> wpa_supplicant, netifd and LuCI interface, which I would like also to
> do with 802.15.4. Thus I did similar things like iwpaninfo and adding
> 802.15.4 support to netifd. With these man can config 802.15.4
> interfaces. Now I am looking for applications to build a 802.15.4
> network like hostapd and wpa_supplicant. Can you give me some advises
> ?

If I understand this correctly you want to send out beacons to announce 
a 15.4 network and do basic PAN coordinator tasks like handing out short 
addresses and keeping track of devices within the PAN. Is that correct?

We do not have this functionality right now. All communication is ad-hoc 
and based knowing network parameters like channel, etc.

Various steps are needed to get to the functionality you are looking 
for. 1) Add support for MAC command frames for network management, 2) 
add support for beacon frames 3) expose a netlink UAPI to act as a PAN 
coordinator and 4) a coordinator daemon in userspace.

regards
Stefan Schmidt

Re: Applications on wpan-linux

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On 04/26/2017 11:05 AM, Xue Liu wrote:
>
>
> On 25 April 2017 at 16:10, Stefan Schmidt <stefan@osg.samsung.com
> <mailto:stefan@osg.samsung.com>> wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> On 04/25/2017 12:00 PM, Xue Liu wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I am working on 802.15.4 integration into OpenWRT/LEDE system. In
>>> OpenWRT/LEDE man can build 802.11 wireless network with hostapd,
>>> wpa_supplicant, netifd and LuCI interface, which I would like also to
>>> do with 802.15.4. Thus I did similar things like iwpaninfo and adding
>>> 802.15.4 support to netifd. With these man can config 802.15.4
>>> interfaces. Now I am looking for applications to build a 802.15.4
>>> network like hostapd and wpa_supplicant. Can you give me some advises
>>> ?
>>
>>
>> If I understand this correctly you want to send out beacons to announce a
>> 15.4 network and do basic PAN coordinator tasks like handing out short
>> addresses and keeping track of devices within the PAN. Is that correct?
>>
>
> Correct.
>
>> We do not have this functionality right now. All communication is
> ad-hoc and
>> based knowing network parameters like channel, etc.
>>
>> Various steps are needed to get to the functionality you are looking
> for. 1)
>> Add support for MAC command frames for network management, 2) add support
>> for beacon frames 3) expose a netlink UAPI to act as a PAN coordinator and
>> 4) a coordinator daemon in userspace.
>>
>
> That sounds complicated. 🤔

It is a big bunch of work indeed.

With your work on various drivers you might have your hands full already. :)

Some more information about this can be found at our todo list SoftMAC 
section and the linked github issues.
https://github.com/linux-wpan/wpan-tools/wiki/todo

regards
Stefan Schmidt

Re: Applications on wpan-linux

[Michael Richardson]

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{cleaning my inbox}

Stefan Schmidt <stefan@osg.samsung.com> wrote:
    > If I understand this correctly you want to send out beacons to announce
    > a 15.4 network and do basic PAN coordinator tasks like handing out
    > short addresses and keeping track of devices within the PAN. Is that
    > correct?

    > We do not have this functionality right now. All communication is
    > ad-hoc and based knowing network parameters like channel, etc.

I feel that perhaps linux-wpan@ is not a focused enough group to actually get
this work done.  Perhaps we simply lack a bit of common marketing?
Maybe a silly single page web site with the ubiquitous "fork me on github"
banner.  Maybe that already exists and is poorly marketed such that I don't
even know about it.

    > Various steps are needed to get to the functionality you are looking
    > for. 1) Add support for MAC command frames for network management, 2)
    > add support for beacon frames 3) expose a netlink UAPI to act as a PAN
    > coordinator and 4) a coordinator daemon in userspace.

At this point, I don't quite recall the summary of solutions that we came
home from NetDev with.  I meant to watch the video to learn what we said :-)

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
]     mcr@sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [


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Re: Applications on wpan-linux

[Alexander Aring]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 04:14:54PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> {cleaning my inbox}
> 
> Stefan Schmidt <stefan@osg.samsung.com> wrote:
>     > If I understand this correctly you want to send out beacons to announce
>     > a 15.4 network and do basic PAN coordinator tasks like handing out
>     > short addresses and keeping track of devices within the PAN. Is that
>     > correct?
> 
>     > We do not have this functionality right now. All communication is
>     > ad-hoc and based knowing network parameters like channel, etc.
> 
> I feel that perhaps linux-wpan@ is not a focused enough group to actually get
> this work done.  Perhaps we simply lack a bit of common marketing?
> Maybe a silly single page web site with the ubiquitous "fork me on github"
> banner.  Maybe that already exists and is poorly marketed such that I don't
> even know about it.
> 

About marketing: I think we need to make some tutorial for RIOT/Contiki
to build e.g. a broder router. All others IoT MCU OS's make their own
Border Router solution and feed their IPv6 Stack on $MCU_IOT_OS over
SLIP and they do marketing with that.

What already happen is that people which using such stuff reports BUGs
to linux-wpan, because they think they actually using Linux 6LoWPAN
which they don't do. :(

Making everything in a state that a simple raspbian can be turned into a
RPL Border Router for Contiki/RIOT OS would be marketing enough I think.
We just need to remove the barriers which we have now, then write wiki
page and propagate it. Not an easy work...

>     > Various steps are needed to get to the functionality you are looking
>     > for. 1) Add support for MAC command frames for network management, 2)
>     > add support for beacon frames 3) expose a netlink UAPI to act as a PAN
>     > coordinator and 4) a coordinator daemon in userspace.
> 
> At this point, I don't quite recall the summary of solutions that we came
> home from NetDev with.  I meant to watch the video to learn what we said :-)
> 

did we talked about that @netdev? :-) We talked mostly about RPL, but
coordinator stuff? In the early days of IEEE 802.15.4 (with sourceforge
kernel stuff which never came into mainline) we hat some _basic_
assoc/deassoc coordinator functionality. With a userspace daemon which
knows which short addresses was still available etc. In short: It was
very orianted to hostapd e.g. 802.11 to run an access point.

I am not so an expert for that, but all MLME-ops (algorithmn to do
assoc/deassoc described by 802.15.4) can be triggered then by a netlink
cmd. E.g. MLME-SCAN (similar to 802.11) can be handled very asynchronous
with START/STOP/ABORT and netlink EVENT callback if some $COORDINATOR
was found.

I think MLME-SCAN would be a _really_ simple MLME-ops where we can start
and lookup architecture from 802.11. Now I need just a 802.15.4 stack
which supports coordinator so I can test it. :-) (Maybe some HardMAC
transceiver?). I don't have any hardware here which can run a
coordinator supported 802.15.4 stack, but maybe we don't need it and just
lookup the 802.15.4 spec for now...

- Alex

Re: Applications on wpan-linux

[Michael Richardson]

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Alexander Aring <alex.aring@gmail.com> wrote:
    > About marketing: I think we need to make some tutorial for RIOT/Contiki
    > to build e.g. a broder router. All others IoT MCU OS's make their own
    > Border Router solution and feed their IPv6 Stack on $MCU_IOT_OS over
    > SLIP and they do marketing with that.

That's not what I mean by marketing.
Assume that we had some tutorial, where would people look for it?
How would it get updated?

Documentation/networking/6lowpan.txt points at no web site.
Documentation/networking//ieee802154.txt points at http://wpan.cakelab.org/
and https://github.com/linux-wpan/wpan-tools

I don't know Christian Fromme, is he still around? He seems to own cakelab.org.
I'm happy with github wiki documentation.

-- 
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [ 
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [ 
]     mcr@sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [ 
	


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Re: Applications on wpan-linux

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On 07/13/2017 10:50 AM, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> Alexander Aring <alex.aring@gmail.com> wrote:
>      > About marketing: I think we need to make some tutorial for RIOT/Contiki
>      > to build e.g. a broder router. All others IoT MCU OS's make their own
>      > Border Router solution and feed their IPv6 Stack on $MCU_IOT_OS over
>      > SLIP and they do marketing with that.
> 
> That's not what I mean by marketing.
> Assume that we had some tutorial, where would people look for it?
> How would it get updated?
> 
> Documentation/networking/6lowpan.txt points at no web site.
> Documentation/networking//ieee802154.txt points at http://wpan.cakelab.org/
> and https://github.com/linux-wpan/wpan-tools
> 
> I don't know Christian Fromme, is he still around? He seems to own cakelab.org.
> I'm happy with github wiki documentation.

I wanted to try out github pages and maybe combine it with read the docs 
under our own domain. But I badly fall behind with my things on my todo 
list recently. Need to make some time for linux-wpan again.

I just looked again and linux-wpan.{net,org} are still free. I might 
just go ahead to register one of them which we can then use to point to 
whatever better marketing we come up with. :)

regards
Stefan Schmidt

Re: Applications on wpan-linux

[Alexander Aring]

Hi,

On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 10:50:23AM +0200, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 
> Alexander Aring <alex.aring@gmail.com> wrote:
>     > About marketing: I think we need to make some tutorial for RIOT/Contiki
>     > to build e.g. a broder router. All others IoT MCU OS's make their own
>     > Border Router solution and feed their IPv6 Stack on $MCU_IOT_OS over
>     > SLIP and they do marketing with that.
> 
> That's not what I mean by marketing.
> Assume that we had some tutorial, where would people look for it?
> How would it get updated?
> 
> Documentation/networking/6lowpan.txt points at no web site.
> Documentation/networking//ieee802154.txt points at http://wpan.cakelab.org/
> and https://github.com/linux-wpan/wpan-tools
> 

ah, yes we need to update this documentation stuff.

> I don't know Christian Fromme, is he still around? He seems to own cakelab.org.

hehe, that's a friend of mine which gave me some little webspace on
cakelab.org to make a project website.

> I'm happy with github wiki documentation.
> 

ok.

- Alex