Hi Qin,

Please find some comments inline <MSC/>.

From: Qin Wu [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2014 4:57 AM
To: Scharf, Michael (Michael)
Cc: IETF ALTO
Subject: RE: Review of draft-ietf-alto-deployments-08#appendix-A

Hi, Michael:
Thanks for re-work and updating to monitoring section.
I have a few comments to section 3.4 you updated.
1. The monitoring infrastructure can be third party,Or can be integrated into 
ALTO server? If it is the third party based, I think the trust relationship 
between monitoring system and alto server needs to be established, otherwise, 
security concern may be raised.

<MSC>
I think the most realistic case it that it is neither third party, nor an 
integrated function of the ALTO server. Instead, a network service provider 
would probably monitor the benefits of its ALTO service by a monitoring 
infrastructure, which could be an extension of the general network monitoring / 
OAM. It could be possible that third parties (e.g., academic researchers) want 
to monitor the benefits as well; in that case, there is indeed a question 
whether they would have access to network service provider data beyond what the 
ALTO service provider exposes. However, since the IETF does not mandate how to 
implement an ALTO server, an implementer could obviously also come up with a 
huge all-in-one ALTO server implementation that realizes many other functions 
beyond providing the ALTO service itself.

I could add a sentence like "Monitoring the benefits of an ALTO service could 
also be realized by third parties. In this case, insight into ALTO data may 
require a trust relationship between the monitoring system operator and the 
network service provider offering an ALTO service." Would this address your 
comment? 
</MSC>

2.  Section 4.3 says:
"
An NSP offering ALTO could consider the impact on (or integration with) traffic
   engineering and the deployment of a monitoring service to observe the
   effects of ALTO operations.
"

Traffic engineering is related to monitoring ALTO performance? I think you may 
gather traffic engineering information from routing protocol, these traffic 
engineering information can be used to reflect network performance and provide 
fine granularity of cost map or network map? However it has nothing to do with 
performance of ALTO?
Performance of ALTO is more about how many request or response can be handled,

<MSC>
This sentence is taken from Section 16.1.4 of the ALTO protocol spec 
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-alto-protocol-25#page-81). Actually, the 
whole scope of Section 3.4 in draft-ietf-alto-deployment is explained in 
Section 16.1.4 of the ALTO protocol spec. Given that explanation there, I am 
not sure if I understand your question and/or concern. Specifically, the whole 
section 3.4 of draft-ietf-alto-deployment deals NOT with how to retrieve 
routing protocol information (including e.g. TE information from IGP) and how 
to put it into network and cost maps. This is discussed in Section 3.2.1.

Let me try to explain how I understand draft-ietf-alto-protocol-25: This 
sentence deals with understanding what impact the ALTO guidance has on 
applications, and whether the ALTO service operation is efficient and 
effectively improving "better-than-random" resource selections by applications. 
I understand here "traffic engineering" in a very general way. For instance, an 
NSP offering an ALTO service for P2P applications would typically expect that 
the amount of aggregated inter-domain traffic is reduced. If ALTO is effective, 
the NSP can probably slow down upgrades of Internet-peering-point capacities; 
this is traffic engineering, but that kind of information may not be carried 
in, or retrieved from routing protocols, and it may not be used to calculate 
ALTO maps. If traffic is kept local in access network domains, the capacity 
planning and traffic engineering of core network links can be adapted, because 
they may have less utilization, e.g., bandwidth allocations of core links could 
be adapt. This can be part of the typical mid-/long-term capacity planning 
processes of a network service provider.

Furthermore, please note the ALTO protocol spec has another section (Section 
16.2.5. Performance Management) that describes examples for system metrics 
characterizing the performance of an ALTO server (e.g., number of requests, 
CPU/memory utilization, etc.).

If you struggle with the term "ALTO performance" in the headline, we could 
perhaps better align the section headlines to draft-ietf-alto-protocol-25, i.e.:

OLD:
3.4. Monitoring the Performance of ALTO
3.4.1. Supervising the Benefits of ALTO
3.4.2. How to Monitor ALTO Performance

NEW:
3.4. Monitoring the Impact of ALTO
3.4.1. Supervising the Benefits of ALTO
3.4.2. How to Observe the Impact of ALTO

Would this address your question?
</MSC>


3. Section 3.4.2 says:
"
Total amount and distribution of traffic: ALTO enables ISPs to
influence and localize traffic of applications that use the ALTO
service.  An ISP may therefore be interested in analyzing the
  impact on the traffic, i.e., whether network traffic patterns are
shifted.  For instance, if ALTO shall be used to reduce the inter-
  domain P2P traffic, it makes sense to evaluate the total amount of
inter-domain traffic of an ISP.  
"
How traffic distribution is related to ALTO performance monitoring, I can not 
understand this.

<MSC>
Again, please refer to Section 16.1.4 in draft-ietf-alto-protocol-25. That 
document states "Deployment of an ALTO Server may shift network traffic 
patterns.". This paragraph just explains examples how one can monitor whether 
ALTO achieves the shift of traffic distribution that an NSP wants to achieve by 
ALTO.
</MSS>


4. Section 3.4.2 says:
"

Application performance: The objective of ALTO is improve
      application performance.  ALTO can be used by very different types
      applications, with different communication characteristics and
      requirements.  For instance, if ALTO guidance achieves traffic
      localization, one would expect that applications achieve a higher
      throughput and/or smaller delays to retrieve data.  Application-
      specific performance characteristics (e.g., video or audio
      quality) can be useful as well.  In addition, selected statistics
      from the TCP/IP stack in hosts can be useful, e.g., the number of
      retransmitted TCP segments.
"
It is not clear to me whether you measure traffic performance or ALTO 
performance?
I think application performance you described here has nothing to do with ALTO 
performance.
Only ALTO system performance is related to ALTO performance. I feel you mix 
traffic performance 
With ALTO performance. What am I missing?

<MSC>
The draft explains the categories "total amount and distribution of traffic", 
"application performance", and "ALTO system performance", and they all refer to 
different aspects. For the headline, I was looking for a short term that 
encompasses all different aspects, and I came up with "ALTO performance" 
(obviously, this is not the ALTO system performance). If you expand it as 
"application-layer topology optimization performance", in my understanding 
"ALTO performance" refers to how efficient and effective the application 
topologies are optimized by deploying an ALTO service.

However, as already mentioned, if the term "ALTO performance" should be 
confusing, I could use the term "impact of ALTO" instead of "ALTO performance", 
i.e., rename the section to "3.4.2. How to Observe the Impact of ALTO". In that 
case, it should be clear that it deals with much more than ALTO system 
performance, "traffic performance", etc. Would this solve your question?
</MSC>

Thanks

Michael

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