On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 4:32 AM, Ben Niven-Jenkins
<[email protected]>wrote:

> Authors, Colleagues,
>
> The meeting minutes from IETF 80 record:
>
> "Jan Medved presents Network-to-server API.
>
>  Jan Seedorf: scope of this work is explicitly excluded in RFC 5693
>  ALTO WG scope description. Enrico: this is new work, currently not
>  in the charter. We should hear it. Jan S.: we need to discuss if we
>  need to standardized it. Eric: it does, but maybe not now."
>
> Regarding whether we need to standardise the Network-to-server "API" for
> ALTO, my opinion is that we do not.
>
>
I concur for now.

It's not clear to me that we fully understand the network abstraction
information to be gathered in the first place. Draft-sun has recommended to
gather information at BAS granularity. Another draft was talking about
inter-ISP network abstraction for better asyn transmission etc.Comcast has
shown that coarse and fine network maps have the similar effect...

Further, I think that the current ALTO WG scope is to define the mechanism
to bind application and network, not the actual network abstraction. Correct
me if I am wrong.

Regards,

Ping


> Extracting network topology by passively listening to routing protocols for
> various purposes including aiding with operations, diagnostics, root cause
> analysis, management, capacity planning, traffic engineering, etc. is not a
> new idea. There are multiple products on the market to enable operators to
> do just that.
>
> An ALTO server that follows a similar approach as a mechanism to import
> network topology into its network topology/map/cost database is a reasonable
> proposition but in my opinion the ALTO WG should not attempt to standardise
> how a ALTO server should perform such integration with an operator's routing
> control plane(s), for example  because:
>
> * Extracting network topology is not an interoperability issue between ALTO
> servers. Each ALTO server can extract the network topology independently and
> if the topology needs to be distributed between ALTO servers then it is an
> ALTO Server-Server API that needs standardising *not* an ALTO Server-Network
> API. Interoperation between an ALTO Server and the underlying network(s) is
> a solved problem as is demonstrated by the numerous interoperable
> implementations of routing protocols.
>
> * Attempting to standardise a single approach is likely to limit the
> applicability of ALTO (or the relevancy of the ALTO Server-Network "API
> standard") because it is unlikely we would be able to converge on a single
> routing protocol that would satisfy the preferences of all operators that
> are likely to deploy an ALTO server.
>
> Ben
>
>
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