Subject: [homenet] Homenet Design Team for Routing Protocol Selection

From: Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 09:33:07 -0400

Terry's email on April 6 confirmed that Homenet will use the approach
of having a Design Team to select the one mandatory-to-implement
routing protocol.   The charter for the design team, as sent in his email,
is below.

I am happy to also announce the membership of the design team with
many thanks to them for taking on this time-consuming and critical job.

Russ White (lead)
Margaret (Wasserman) Cullen
Ralph Droms
Philippe Klein
Wes George
Ross Callon

The design team has a private mailing list [email-masked]
for their internal communication.   The design team members are the
only ones on that mailing list.

Charter:

"Homenet's architecture (RFC 7368) articulates the general features
required.  The working group has agreed that a single routing protocol
must be identified as mandatory to implement.  The final purpose of
this design team is to select and present a single routing protocol
with a summary of the necessary extensions and work to be the one that
is mandatory to implement.  Once the design team has made its
recommendation, the working group will consider any substantial
technical objections (see RFC 7282) as part of gaining consensus.

For the design team to make this determination, it shall first
understand the use-cases for homenet and derive routing requirements
from those.  Then it shall compare these routing requirements to
candidate routing protocols and examine the gaps in each.  For each
highly plausible candidate routing protocol, the design team will
estimate the work and actions needed, the resources at hand
or reasonably available, and the associated timeline to get
an acceptable, full, standardized solution using each protocol.
Based upon this information and the perceived market timing
needs of the technology, the design team will make its selection.
The requirements, gaps, and reasoning will be documented.

This document should be delivered by the July 2015 IETF."

Regards,
Alia

---

From: Lorenzo Colitti <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 23:05:46 +0900

Alia,

Russ White (lead)
> Margaret (Wasserman) Cullen

Nowhere on that list do I see names that I recognize as being involved in
current homenet implementations - or at least, in the implementations that
seem most likely for selection.

Is there a reason that none of those implementers were made part of the
team? Was it done intentionally, out of concern that if they had been on
the team, they would be partial to their own designs?

If not, then... well, how can the team make a useful decision if it has not
been involved with the work so far?

Regards,
Lorenzo

---

From: Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 10:24:28 -0400

Lorenzo,

> the team, they would be partial to their own designs?

Yes - we want the design team to be impartial and make an informed
technical decision.  There were many others
that were considered but impartiality was a very important criteria.  It
does no good for the design team to recreate the extremely polarized
conversation that have happened in Homenet.

We did include Philippe as someone who is familiar with constrained
environments as well layer 2 considerations.

> been involved with the work so far?

It was done intentionally.  I believe that this design team has the
background and knowledge to assess requirements and compare against
candidate routing protocols.  The design team is most able to reach out to
others for questions and advice.

Regards,
Alia

---

From: Juliusz Chroboczek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 2015 17:18:13 +0200

> we want the design team to be impartial

I think only Margaret has a passing familiarity with Babel.  Since the
team is impartial, I assume there's also at most one person familiar with
IS-IS?

-- Juliusz

---

From: Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 11:25:17 -0400

> team is impartial, I assume there's also at most one person familiar with

In this, you would be incorrect.  Russ White is also familiar with Babel.
That is
also - sorry - a false presentation of fairness which assumes that those on
the
design team will be biased and that it is reasonable and necessary to find
equal numbers of
people familiar with one of the most widely deployed IGPs and with an
interesting
protocol that has a niche deployment.

There is knowledge of multiple IGPs in the team - and as critically, an
impartiality
and willingness to listen and consider the requirements and how the
candidates compare.
What I think we needed on the design team is both impartiality,
understanding of homenet
use cases for deriving use-cases, understanding of different IGPs, and
understanding
how to select a routing protocol based upon requirements.

Regards,
Alia

---

From: Juliusz Chroboczek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 2015 17:40:46 +0200

>> I think only Margaret has a passing familiarity with Babel.
>
> Russ White is also familiar with Babel.

Correct.  Apologies to Russ.

This doesn't change the fact that the right way to choose an impartial
team is to select people who can correct each other's biases.  I am fairly
positive this is not the case in this particular group of experts.

-- Juliusz

---

From: Dave Taht <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 10:43:06 -0700

> only ones on that mailing list.

Had the proposal for the design team had been for a "private design team"
I think you would have raise more ruckus here. That said, the ruckus and
email burden was enough to make me nearly quit this list to focus
on more important matters like making wifi scale to the next 10
billion users over the next 5 years.

I am glad that there is 802.14 expertise on this design team, I think
that wireless standard is very important to interoperate with, and
for too long this wg has fought over wired vs wireless concepts
without feedback from the IoT folk.

I am glad there appears to be some source code over here
worth looking at: https://twatteyne.wordpress.com/projects/openwsn/

In my case, since the burden of actually participating in a new  group
before july is now gone, I plan to focus on my primary missions in fq
and aqm technologies and moving them into more hardware, as well as
stablizing the openwrt chaos calmer code base for release this summer.
IF there is any other source code worth incorporating into my
testbeds, please let me know soon. I already ship batman, bmx6, olsr,
hnetd, babel, and everything in quagga.

It is off topic for this thread, but if there is anyone out there that
 would like to see some faster/better home cpe built with modern
fq/aqm/shaping algorithms, maybe with support for loop avoiding
bellman ford in gates... see my .sig. Only 24 hours left to run on the
darn kickstarter.

> an acceptable, full, standardized solution using each protocol.

I look forward also to estimates as to making it widely available
as source code.

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

-- 
Dave Täht
We CAN make better hardware, ourselves, beat bufferbloat, and take
back control of the edge of the internet! If we work together, on
making it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onetswitch/onetswitch-open-source-hardware-for-networking