TECHNICAL FIELD

The present disclosure generally relates to a root network device causing execution of network service operations on behalf of a constrained wireless network device in a low power and lossy network.

BACKGROUND

This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.

Large-scale wireless mesh networks can be deployed in the form of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) wireless radio frequency (RF) mesh networks, deployed for example using wireless link layer protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4e and/or IEEE 802.15.4g (referred to herein as “IEEE 802.15.4e/g”). Such large-scale wireless mesh networks (also referred to as field area networks (FANs), or Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs)) can be used for deployment of, for example, a connected grid mesh (CG-mesh) network advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The LLN (e.g., CG-mesh) network can include thousands of IEEE 802.15.4e/g based resource-constrained (e.g., low-power) network devices (also referred to herein as Low Power and Lossy Network (LLN) devices), where each LLN network device can reach, within its transmission range, hundreds of neighboring network devices. Hence, noise and/or interference on a wireless RF channel can affect communications between LLN network devices.

A problem associated with the deployment of the CG-mesh network that comprises thousands of LLN devices is that a source device that is outside the CG-mesh network (also referred to herein as a “head end device”) sending one or more data packets to different LLN devices in the CG-mesh network can cause substantial traffic burdens in the CG-mesh: for example, if a given destination LLN device is incapable of processing a received data packet having been sent from the head end device via the CG-mesh network, the destination LLN device needs to respond to the head end device with an error message, for example an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) error message. Consequently the data packet originated by the head end device can cause substantial processing burdens on the LLN network devices required to respond to the erroneous data packets, and further causes substantial processing burdens due to the traffic encountered by the propagation of the erroneous data packets and resulting error messages in the CG-mesh network.

