I become somewhat concerned during the IETF week about how we deal with experimentation and implementation efforts in this group. Implementation is important. Experiments are important. Simulations are important. Some of the reasons why we should be doing these include:
- proof of concept -- yes, it works - indication of sufficient interest for someone to at least implement the proposal - convincing others to try my stuff out - feedback on implementation issues as well as - understanding the trade-offs related to different design choices - being able to measure the effects to the traffic passing through - understanding the dynamic behaviour of the system - comparing different approaches - learning from all this to adjust the proposals However, while there is a lot of interest in the group about implementation, I sensed that it is currently focused mostly on the items on the first list. Its great to know that some of the ideas actually work in lab and that people have enough interest to do this stuff. However, to make progress, we need to go further. I'd like to see efforts that provide some useful information in terms of what design choices to make, whether the new routing architecture goes unnoticed by the end users or if it wrecks their day, what the characteristics of the mapping system would be if we turned it on in the Internet, etc. I realize its early and that we're not there yet. The effort is quite rightly being spent on getting initial designs up and running. But lets be clear: at some point we will need to understand what the implications of our designs are and why making a particular design choice is a good idea. How do we get there? Do we know what questions we need to answer? Is there something that the RRG can help organize? Do we need stable snapshots of some of the proposals as experimental RFCs as a base for some of the work? Do we need expertise from people not currently part of the RRG? Jari -- to unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body. archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg
