Subject: [homenet] FW: New Version Notification for draft-jvkjjmb-home-networking-incremental-00.txt

From: Victor Kuarsingh <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 22:48:58 -0400

Homenet WG,

A draft has been submitted (below) which outlines a home network
progression from current state (reference point RFC6204) to future
advanced states.

The progression is outlined as an incremental approach to achieve the full
envisioned homenet architecture over a series of phases (additive
capabilities).

The progression outlined was envisioned such that the home network can be
evolve in a controlled and feasible manner considering the realities of
brownfield deployments in environments that must remain operational during
the transition.

The WGs feedback is desired and requested.

Regards,

Victor K

On 2013-07-04 10:34 PM, "[email-masked]"
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>
>A new version of I-D, draft-jvkjjmb-home-networking-incremental-00.txt
>has been successfully submitted by Victor Kuarsingh and posted to the
>IETF repository.
>
>Filename:	 draft-jvkjjmb-home-networking-incremental
>Revision:	 00
>Title:		 An incremental solution to advanced home networking
>Creation date:	 2013-07-04
>Group:		 Individual Submission
>Number of pages: 24
>URL:             
>http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-jvkjjmb-home-networking-incremen
>tal-00.txt
>Status:          
>http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-jvkjjmb-home-networking-incremental
>Htmlized:        
>http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jvkjjmb-home-networking-incremental-00
>
>
>Abstract:
>   The home network is an environment subject to ongoing evolution and
>   change.  Many home networks today are simplistic in nature, often
>   comprising of a single router/gateway.  The expectation over time is
>   predicated on the notion that the home network will be more complex
>   servicing many in-home and Internet functions.  The home network will
>   evolve necessitating the replacement and update to current hardware
>   and software to more advanced devices and software capable of
>   operating in more complex environments.  This document provides a
>   view on how the home network can progress from today's foundational
>   form, to a more advanced environment, using progressive technological
>   capabilities.
>
>
>                  
>        
>
>
>The IETF Secretariat
>

---

From: Lorenzo Colitti <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2013 19:29:20 +0900

Victor,

thanks for posting. A few comments:

First, some of the draft, particularly the flowing prose in sections 1-3,
or things like "will not only act as an enabler but will also provide
criticality required transition capabilities to ensure advanced phases can
also be deployed seamlessly to both customers and operators with minimal
disruption" is unnecessarily verbose and marketing-y for a technical
document. Perhaps it could be shortened.

More importantly, I see issues with the message of the draft itself. For a
draft whose main proposal is an "incremental upgrade path", I'm surprised
that no upgrade path is actually presented. A number of phases are
described, but no actual upgrade path is provided. I think this is a real
concern, because I see important ways in which each the intermediate
phases, instead of being an incremental step, could actually be a barrier
to further progress.

A very basic example is ISPs delegating only a /64 to each home network.
This is a barrier to evolution, because home routers are often written to
the lowest common denominator. If ISPs hand out /64s, we might see
widespread adoption of routers that only support /64 and choke when given
anything else. At that point, it becomes impossible for ISPs to hand out
prefixes larger than /64s because of the fear of breaking customer
connectivity. Fortunately this does not appear to be the case because most
ISPs started to provide larger than /64 prefixes from day one; but it would
have been a real problem if most ISPs had standardized on /64.

Another example is the fact that the draft proposes a tree topology
("Medius" and "Provectus") as intermediate between a flat one-link topology
and a fully meshed topology. That sounds good in theory, but in practice
things aren't that simple, because as soon as you have even just one device
that doesn't support meshing, the mesh doesn't work any more. Try putting
an router that only supports EIGRP into an OSPF or IS-IS based network -
the whole thing falls over. So in fact, far from being an intermediate
step, these phases actually constitute barriers that make it harder to get
to the end state.

As another example, in the "Provectus" phase, it is stated that a routing
protocol is "optional". How is this going to work? What happens when some
but not all routers speak the routing protocol? Which source of information
will be authoritative?  Who is going to turn the routing protocol on? And
so on.

So saying "we'll get there in phases" is well and good, but to do that the
draft needs to explain how to get from one phase to another, and explain
how deploying "intermediate" phases makes the end result easier, not more
difficult, to achieve.

The draft also doesn't have answers to problems that have recently been
making the rounds on this list. For example, how will meshed topologies
work in a tree model? How does that model react to topology changes without
breaking connectivity? And so on. I understand that this document is meant
to be a high-level overview of a possible path forward, but unfortunately,
these issues have seen a lot of discussion in the group recently, and no
consensus has emerged that it's even possible to solve some of these
migration problems in a phased manner. In order to decide whether the
proposed path forward is a good one, I'm afraid we're going to have to dive
a little deeper into the details and figure out whether and how these
problems can be solved.

Cheers,
Lorenzo

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Victor Kuarsingh <[email-masked]> wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> homenet mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet
>

---

From: "Russ White" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 08:31:25 -0400

> First, some of the draft, particularly the flowing prose in sections 1-3,
or
> things like "will not only act as an enabler but will also provide
criticality
> required transition capabilities to ensure advanced phases can also be
> deployed seamlessly to both customers and operators with minimal

I would agree with this... A lot of the text here seems to be a mixture of
requirements for basic homenet operation and drivers for homenet adoption,
etc. I don't know if these really belong in a document of this type --they
could at least be shorterned to bring the text to the point of the draft
more quickly.

> More importantly, I see issues with the message of the draft itself.
> For a draft whose main proposal is an "incremental upgrade path", I'm
> surprised that no upgrade path is actually presented. A number of phases
are
> phases, instead of being an incremental step, could actually be a barrier
to
> further progress.

I would agree with this as well... In fact, I'm not certain we "need" a
draft describing the incremental upgrade path for the actual home network.
It seems like we'd need more about how to manage things from the provider
side, rather than from the home network side.

I don't know how to be more specific --sorry.

:-)

Russ