The IESG has approved publication of the following Internet-Drafts: o General Switch Management Protocol V3 <draft-ietf-gsmp-11.txt> as a Proposed Standard. o GSMP Packet Encapsulations for ATM, Ethernet and TCP <draft-ietf-gsmp-encaps-05.txt> as a Proposed Standard. o General Switch Management Protocol Applicability <draft-ietf-gsmp-applicability-02.txt> as an Informational RFC. These documents are the product of the General Switch Management Protocol Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Bert Wijnen and Scott Bradner. Technical Summary The General Switch Management Protocol (GSMP) is a general purpose protocol to control a label switch. GSMP allows a controller to establish and release connections across the switch; add and delete leaves on a multicast connection; manage switch ports; request configuration information; request and delete reservation of switch resources; and request statistics. It also allows the switch to inform the controller of asynchronous events such as a link going down. The GSMP protocol is asymmetric, the controller being the master and the switch being the slave. Multiple switches may be controlled by a single controller using multiple instantiations of the protocol over separate control connections. Also a switch may be controlled by more than one controller by using the technique of partitioning, i.e., a "physical" switch that is partitioned into several virtual switches. The document "General Switch Management Protocol V3" describes the protocol itself, the document "GSMP Packet Encapsulations for ATM, Ethernet and TCP" specifies the encapsulation of GSMP packets in ATM, Ethernet and TCP, and the document "General Switch Management Protocol Applicability" provides an overview of the GSMP protocol and includes information relating to its deployment in a IP network in an MPLS environment. Working Group Summary The documents represent the consensus of the Working Group. Protocol Quality These documents were reviewed for the IESG by Scott Bradner.
