W3C

– DRAFT –
WoT Use Cases

08 February 2022

Attendees

Present
Antonio_Virdis_UniPisa, Carlo_Puliafito, Christine_Perey, Cristiano_Aguzzi, David_Ezell, Kaz_Ashimura, Michael_Lagally, Michael_McCool, Tomoaki_Mizushima
Regrets
-
Chair
Lagally
Scribe
McCool

Meeting minutes

minutes review

<kaz> Jan-11

review minutes from 01-11

Lagally: any objections to publish?
… hearing none, will publish

review minutes 01-25

Lagally: had guests, so reminded people of patent policy, looked at Carlo's contribution, and update from Christine (McCool and Christine took an offline 1:1)
… any objections to publish?
… hearing none, will publish

<kaz> (link for Carlo's slides to be added)

contributions and prs

PR 182

<mlagally> https://github.com/w3c/wot-usecases/pull/182

Lagally: slides from presentation two weeks ago
… migration use case from University of Pisa

Lagally: prefer to have it under CONTRIBUTIONS
… PDF, can use for preview; seems to work now

Lagally: shall we merge?
… merged

PR #186

<kaz> PR 186 - Add Service Migration horizontal use case

Lagally: service migration use case

Cristiano: not complete yet, but we can look at it today

Cristiano: was not sure title is the right title

McCool: I think mobility is confusable with accessibility issues, migration is prob the correct term

Lagally: feel there could be a better title

McCool: I do think migration is a standard term for this, could add "between servers"

Cristiano: I think it is horizontal, tried to identify suitable stakeholder

Cristiano: also use thing directory as notifiers
… then have motivation, but not too much information on how to apply
… I added a reference to our study
… not sure that is appropriate

McCool: two points: related to edge service migration being discussed in WNIG; also, why not use ipv6

Lagally: maybe bring use cases to the table?

Lagally: maybe ipv6 is too low-level?

McCool: just saying it should be pointed out that dealing with segmented networks is a precondition for this problem to exist, since it's about updating ipv4 addresses

Cristiano: so do we add WNIG to stakeholders?

Lagally: yes, or references

Lagally: drive in the car, move from one access point to another, IP can change

McCool: another question, is why does DNS not solve this problem?

McCool: another point is avoiding gaps in data when a service migrates
… may want to keep it running in two places during transition to avoid gaps...

Lagally: let's make sure we look at the actual PR

Carlo: description says there are two main problems: management of state and transfer; and ip addressing
… servient is our microservice, managed in a container
… in description, focus separately on state and addressing
… for state, value of properties, state of behaviours, etc.
… this state can be transferred in different ways, discuss under variants
… cite two different works
… from Pisa and Bologna
… these are a little different
… whole container movement is one option; use existing container mechanisms
… benefit is transfer is a low level; but can transfer a larger amount of data
… but advantage is transparent to application
… cristiano's approach uses a mobile agent approach
… in this they transfer state collected by the application itself, and is not transparent to the application
… certain functions need to be implemented by the application
… and application needs to actively pull the state
… but the advantage is that less data needs to be translated
… and don't have to transfer the entire environment
… then the use case discusses addressing, and how to update address
… in this case there are also several possibilities
… one is to let web Thing handle it by adding additional affordances, e.g. onMigration event
… another approach, proposed by cristiano, leverages TD and Directories directly, and actively pushes notifications
… finally, with respect to addressing, raised a point in gaps
… what about TCP connections; when IP address changes, connection will be closed
… and needs to be reestablished
… one solution is to use UDP and a suitable protocol; we use CoAP
… another option is QUIC
… this is gaining momentum recently
… it defines a mechanism to allow a connection to migrate
… connections are not identified by IP address and port, but its own identifiers
… but QUIC only applies this when client changes address
… but we have extended to also support cases where the server migrates
… so in short, the gap can be filled by developing a suitable HTTP/3 (HTTP over QUIC) protocol extension

Lagally: when you have a migrated Thing, is it still the same Thing? Does it need a new TD

McCool: (or id value?)

Lagally: suppose we have location metadata... does it need to be updated in the TD?
… how should this be handled?

Cristiano: how we handle this now is use a TDD that can notify the client
… that the TD was migrated, which changes the IP in the TD
… so if there is other metadata in the TD, it can be updated at the same time

Lagally: second question, when you do this migration, shut down first thing, bring the new thing up
… may want to limit authority to do this
… who among these stakeholders would be permitted to do this?

Cristiano: good question; in our work, we had an orchestrator that was the only entity that could do this
… but then who controls the orchestration?
… there are also cases where the developer or other stakeholders may have requirements
… there are requirements; distributed among the actors

Carlo: the property that we introduce, "migratable", does allow this to be specified in the TD

Lagally: something to consider: tell the thing that it can be migratable; can migratable property change?

McCool: two points, changes in location already being discussed under geolocation
… second point, is probably want to define quality of service, and then cloud/edge provider can migrate as long as they don't violate the terms of service

Cristiano: the paper does discuss this

carlo: position may not be an affordance, maybe be metadata

McCool: agree, that is what we are looking at as well

carlo: metadata is supposed to be static, properties are dynamic

McCool: agree, there are cases though when data that was *supposed* to be static has to be updated anyway, e.g. reinstalling a sensor in a new location

carlo: regarding fact that service in clouds are migrating anyway and we are not noticing... this is why we propose container migration, which is transparent

Kaz: can understand need for state pres and restore, but feel that this use case is a bit too researchy for standardization
… would like to see a few more concrete use cases
… for example, within a smart city context
… for instance, working at home, need to move to office, need to restore settings, etc.

Cristiano: agree with that; in paper do talk about vertical use cases
… italian-wide project for monitoring bridges

Cristiano: but this is still research level

Lagally: still think this is valuable and we should include it, but more concrete use case

Lagally: how do we close on this topic? Another update on this use case?

Cristiano: will do another round of revisions

Lagally: including a title update

geolocation

<kaz> issue 180 - Geolocation Review

Christine: I also created individual issues for specific problems
… in particular, AR/VR; I don't think it's exactly a horizontal use case; the "virtual guide" should be moved to "Smart City".

McCool: I concur

Lagally: rationale makes sense
… we put it in horizontal because AR applies to many things

Christine: agree it could be modified a bit

Christine: core recommendation is that it is not a horizontal use case, it is an enabler, not a use case for WoT itself

Lagally: the issue is if we put it in smart cities, it sounds like we can't use it for health

Christine: right, it applies to all of them where visualization is a goal
… purpose of use cases is just to generate requirements; putting in one place is enough to satisfy goals of extracting requirements

McCool: problem is that this, as written, is a vertical use case

Christine: argue we don't even need a vertical description, is enabler for human, not WoT

McCool: analogy is browser...

Lagally: since we are running out of time, defer to next week
… maybe have to follow up some more with Christine

Kaz: as one of the original proposals, agree with ML's position
… question is whether we need to restructure document or not; do we even need two sections, one for vertical and horizontal?
… perhaps too simplistic

Lagally: maybe defer to next cycle

McCool: sure, but I think that is later this year, not next charter

Lagally: in next call will look again at geolocation

<kaz> [adjourned]

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 185 (Thu Dec 2 18:51:55 2021 UTC).