Adding GPS location to IPv6 header

Mon Nov 26 15:20:43 UTC 2012

On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 12:56:52PM -0200, Carlos M. Martinez wrote:
> Just for redundancy's sake: No, L3 is **not** the place for this kind of
> information. L3 is supposed to be simple, easy to implement, fast to

I agree. You need to put it into L2, and the core usage would
be for wireless meshes. Consider cases like Serval or cjdns, 
which run on Android headsets and equivalent embeddeds.
Technically you wouldn't need GPS everywhere if you could
do ~m scale time domain reflectometry in free space.
It is possible to build a local contiguous map via
mutual time of flight triangulation (actually, just visibility
gives you a very good hint).

Another such application could be
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Data_Relay_Satellite
(the realtime precision tracking problem has been solved recently).

> switch. In Spanish we have a very strong adjective for this kind of
> ideas: "pésimo". I couldn't find a similar one in English without using
> foul words :-)
> 
> In any case, and as it already has been pointed out, I can imagine an
> upper layer protocol, similar to NTP that reports GPS coordinates. Come
> to think of it, if NTP could be extended this would fit in nicely as
> there are already lots of NTP nodes which already have GPS sensors.

Can you see any good uses for this? Area fencing, for games,
maybe. I don't see why you couldn't just bind gpsd to port
on a public IP, same as GPS sharing over WLAN tethering is
done. So it's basically a solved problem, no need for RFC
drafts.

> Additionally, unless the proponents of this idea are expecting every
> router manufacturer to build GPS chips into their gear and us datacentre
> operators to drill holes on our roofs for the antennas, I don't see any

Some routers *are* already on the roofs. Or on towers.
Or in LEO. Visibility is pretty good once you're 
above few 10 km, and weather is just perfect in
orbit. The only storms are of the proton particle
variety.

> real useful role for this extension header.
> 