Subject: [homenet] Routing Design Team outcome and next steps

From: Ray Bellis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 11:07:44 +0000

The Internet Area AD and Routing Area AD engaged with the Homenet WG, in
coordination with the Chair of the Routing Design Team assigned to
Homenet, have concluded the Design Team and issue the following statement:

--8<--8<--

Due to the evolving nature of Homenet a single clear and definitive
recommendation cannot be provided by the Design Team as to which single
routing protocol should be adopted. Several protocols could be shown to
have equal utility in the implementation space. Sadly, it is clear that
broad vendor support is not yet in place, and this introduces a
potential dependency scenario. That is, a broad running code-base might
not exist until a decision is made, and similarly an informed decision
can not be made without the experience from a broad running code-base.
It is the advice of the Design Team that Homenet encourage experimental
trials, and therefore output experimental documents, of the routing
options and results and review these and any temporary routing protocol
selection at the appropriate time in the future when sufficient
deployment experience exists.

Collectively we would like to express our sincere thanks the Design Team
participants for their efforts on a challenging topic.

Russ White, DT Chair
Alia Atlas, RTG Area AD
Terry Manderson, INT Area AD

--8<--8<--

Notwithstanding the valiant efforts of the Design Team, the Chairs
believe that there is WG consensus that a single “mandatory to
implement” routing protocol must be chosen. We also believe that further
delaying the direction here has long passed the point of diminishing
returns.

Based on the feedback received in Prague and on the WG mailing list
thereafter, we are therefore declaring rough consensus that Babel[*]
shall be the “mandatory to implement” routing protocol for Homenet
routers, albeit only on an Experimental basis at this time.

The aim in making this decision is to allow the non-routing-protocol
aspects of Homenet to move forward in the near term, while allowing time
for additional implementation, experimentation and specification. To
that end, we solicit Experimental Internet Drafts to document
Homenet-specific profiles of any applicable routing solution and to
report results of any relevant experimentation and implementation.

We expect that this decision will be revisited in a future Standards
Track document based on specifications and running code available at
that time.

- Ray, Mark and Terry

* Vendors looking to ship Homenet routers in the near term should refer
to RFC 6126, RFC 7557, draft-boutier-babel-source-specific, and
available open source implementations thereof for the routing protocol
portion of the Homenet solution space.

---

From: Lorenzo Colitti <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 20:18:42 +0900

Hear, hear!

We have spent far too much time arguing about this, and I am happy we have
a conclusion. A big thank you to the chairs for calling making this call. I
strongly agree that given the dynamics of the home networking market, there
needs to be one, and only one, routing protocol. I don't see anything else
working in the real world.

Personally, I happen to think that babel is the best choice, not so much
because of the protocol itself but because of the current availability of
solid, freely-licensed, small-footprint implementations. But IS-IS would
have been fine as well; so would OSPF, if there had been an implementation,
and even HNCP fallback would have fine. At the end of the day it doesn't
really matter which one we choose, as long as we choose one.

Let's hope that this will stop the arguments and we can all get on with
implementation and deployment.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 8:07 PM, Ray Bellis <[email-masked]> wrote:

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

---

From: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 14:08:22 +0100

Lorenzo Colitti <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hear, hear!
>
> We have spent far too much time arguing about this, and I am happy we have a
> conclusion. A big thank you to the chairs for calling making this call. I
> Personally, I happen to think that babel is the best choice, not so much because
> of the protocol itself but because of the current availability of solid,
> freely-licensed, small-footprint implementations. But IS-IS would have been fine
> as well; so would OSPF, if there had been an implementation, and even HNCP
> fallback would have fine. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter which
> one we choose, as long as we choose one.
>

+1

-Toke

---

From: Sander Steffann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 14:12:16 +0100

> Op 27 okt. 2015, om 12:18 heeft Lorenzo Colitti <[email-masked]> het volgende geschreven:
> 
> Hear, hear!
> 
> We have spent far too much time arguing about this, and I am happy we have a conclusion. A big thank you to the chairs for calling making this call. I strongly agree that given the dynamics of the home networking market, there needs to be one, and only one, routing protocol. I don't see anything else working in the real world.
> 
> Personally, I happen to think that babel is the best choice, not so much because of the protocol itself but because of the current availability of solid, freely-licensed, small-footprint implementations. But IS-IS would have been fine as well; so would OSPF, if there had been an implementation, and even HNCP fallback would have fine. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter which one we choose, as long as we choose one.
> 
> Let's hope that this will stop the arguments and we can all get on with implementation and deployment.

Well said, +1 to all of the above

Cheers,
Sander

---

From: Tim Chown <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 13:13:26 +0000

> Let's hope that this will stop the arguments and we can all get on with implementation and deployment.

Indeed, well done to all concerned for reaching consensus on the way forward. It’s been a year since RFC7368 was published, so it’s great to see that we can now progress more specific items as Ray describes.

Tim

> 
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 8:07 PM, Ray Bellis <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
> [email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet <https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet>
>

---

From: Terry Manderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2015 02:55:11 +0000

I'd like to chime in here, wearing the responsible AD fez, and hopefully
add some transparency.

This decision comes from the following motivations:
	1) Fixing the WG dysfunction, it could not continue. (I'd say everyone
knew that one!!)
	2) Get folk working toward making more robust implementations and getting
real world experience, with the hope of vendors diving in and developing
their own product and institutional knowledge.
	3) As it's an EXPERIMENTAL direction, and WILL be reviewed prior to
solidifying in PS; Provide every opportunity for the parties interested in
standardising the available routing protocol options to do so. I urge all
who are interested to run to your nearest RTG Area AD (hint: look at the
IETF agenda for RTG Area office hours)
	4) Understand, at a deep technical level, why routing protocol X IS the
'best fit' with thorough experimentation and documentation.

The positive remarks I've seen on the list so far suggest that we are over
the dysfunctional hump (yay!). I'm looking forward to seeing awesome work
come from the HOMENET WG, and will relish the day I have vendors pushing a
HOMENET device at me.

I'll leave it to your very capable chairs to steward the rest of the
discussion and agenda on this topic.

Cheers, and see you all next week!

Terry

On 27/10/2015 9:18 pm, "homenet on behalf of Lorenzo Colitti"
<[email-masked] on behalf of [email-masked]> wrote:

>Hear, hear!
>
>
>We have spent far too much time arguing about this, and I am happy we
>have a conclusion. A big thank you to the chairs for calling making this
>call. I strongly agree that given the dynamics of the home networking
>market, there needs to be one, and only
> one, routing protocol. I don't see anything else working in the real
>world.
>
>
>have been fine as well; so would
> OSPF, if there had been an implementation, and even HNCP fallback would
>have fine. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter which one we
>choose, as long as we choose one.
>
>
>believe that there is WG consensus that a single ³mandatory to
>implement² routing protocol must be chosen. We also believe that further
>shall be the ³mandatory to implement² routing protocol for Homenet

---

From: Juliusz Chroboczek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2015 12:20:53 +0100

> routers, albeit only on an Experimental basis at this time.

Thanks to both of you for taking this upon yourselves.

> we solicit Experimental Internet Drafts to document Homenet-specific
> profiles of any applicable routing solution and to report results of any
> relevant experimentation and implementation.

Plenty of work.  (Rubs hands with glee.)

-- Juliusz

---

From: Gert Doering <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2015 17:57:26 +0100

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:07:44AM +0000, Ray Bellis wrote:
> shall be the ???mandatory to implement??? routing protocol for Homenet

Thanks for making a decision.  This was needed so people can go out
and build this stuff into off-the-shelf ware.

Gert Doering
        -- NetMaster
-- 
have you enabled IPv6 on something today...?

SpaceNet AG                        Vorstand: Sebastian v. Bomhard
Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14          Aufsichtsratsvors.: A. Grundner-Culemann
D-80807 Muenchen                   HRB: 136055 (AG Muenchen)
Tel: +49 (0)89/32356-444           USt-IdNr.: DE813185279