Subject: [Anima] Basic Questions

From: Hannes Tschofenig <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 15:02:09 +0100

Dear Anima Working Group,

I was trying to do reviews of the ANIMA documents. My goal was to find
out whether they are applicable to my work.

I wrote a long review but in the end I realized it had quite a
depressive tone.

So, I am starting fresh and ask some very basic questions:

a) What use cases are you guys trying to solve?

b) Is there something that can be done to at least harmonize the
terminology (with the other efforts that are already ongoing)?

c) Could something be done regarding the overlap with work in other
groups (in the IETF) and even outside the IETF? While the different
terminology conceals some of these overlaps quite nicely it will sooner
or later be noticed by others as well.

Ciao
Hannes

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 08:38:44 +1300

Hi Hannes,

> a) What use cases are you guys trying to solve?

Well... everything.

Seriously, I don't know if you were at the original UCAN BOF,
but we did survey a wide range (7) of use cases. The materials
are at http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/90/ucan.html .

During chartering, the decision was to focus on just a couple
of initial use cases but the ambition remains as a very general
set of mechanisms. Anything that can be configured conventionally
is a potential use case.

> terminology (with the other efforts that are already ongoing)?

We have a bit of a dilemma because autonomic networking has been
a field of study for a decade and has its own terminology. But of
course I agree in principle that harmonisation, or at least a common
dictionary, would be very desirable. We'd need to see some of your
review to discuss that specifically, I guess.

> or later be noticed by others as well.

Again, it's difficult to do that without specifics. To some extent
the problem is unsolvable because we are trying to do something generic,
which by definition overlaps with everything. To take the example of
homenet, we understand to a fair extent the risk of overlap with DNCP.
That doesn't mean we won't have features in GDNP that are already
provided by DNCP.

We're trying to produce a toolkit. But the specific use cases would
be applications of this toolkit, and it's well understood that they
have to co-exist with existing solutions. If you like, the junction
point between the generic solution and the existing solutions will
be the Autonomic Service Agents. (This is something we should develop
further in draft-behringer-anima-reference-model, I believe.)

Certainly, a list of what you see as terminology equivalents
and potentially overlapping efforts would be highly valuable.

Regards
    Brian

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 08:38:54 +1300

Hi Hannes,

Well... everything.

Regards
    Brian

---

From: Hannes Tschofenig <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 21:00:50 +0100

Hi Brian,

thanks for the quick response.

> are at http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/90/ucan.html .

Thanks for the pointer. I was unfortunately not at that BOF and so I
will have to study the material.

Before responding to your other questions (where you essentially ask for
more details) I guess I will have to do some reading first.

Ciao
Hannes

---

From: Sheng Jiang <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 04:00:49 +0000

>set of mechanisms. Anything that can be configured conventionally

The autonomic network has wide range. It could cover almost every aspect of network management. It may refer to all efforts that replace human operators by autonomic closed-loop control performed by devices themselves.

However, ANIMA WG has much more modest scope: to define/standard a minimum set of specific reusable infrastructure components to support autonomic interactions between devices. It is intended to mitigate the duplication of similar mechanisms. So far, we have identified generic discovery & negotiation protocol, bootstrapping a trust infrastructure and autonomic control plane in our WG charter. I am sure there are more reusable infrastructure components, which we should also work. In the WG charter, we have only two use cases for validating the application and reusability of the components. Other use cases or autonomic service agents are strongly encouraged, as individual submissions. They may only be adopted with approval from the responsible Area Director or by re-chartering.

Best regards,

Sheng

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