Subject: Last Call: IP Header Compression ...

From: "William Allen Simpson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 98 19:14:11 GMT

I have many concerns about this draft.

 1) there have been several other efforts at generalized header
    compression in the past, including my own draft of September 1994
    for IPv6, and there are insufficient acknowlegements, although there
    are distinct similarities in text and organization.

 2) there appears to be poor coordination between header and data
    compression proposals in several working groups.  This topic is also
    under discussion in the PPP, L2TP, IPVBI and IPPCP.  It also affects
    IPSec and MobileIP.

 3) the mechanism proposed (where it differs from other proposals) does
    not seem to be as useful for L2TP.  It assumes a link with very
    low losses.  L2TP operates over the Internet, and we regularly see
    significant losses.  There is currently no easy method to determine
    that the PPP negotiation is actually over L2TP, and then this header
    compression mechanism will fail badly.  This will also be a problem
    for IPSec and other use of IP in IP tunnels.

 4) The proposal is reasonably well organized, but suffers from having
    too much IPv6 specific detail.  IPv4 is included, but later and as a
    second class citizen.

    I recommend that the draft be split into 2 or more parts, one for
    general TCP and UDP mechanism (perhaps adding RTP), and another for
    IPv6 specific headers which are orthogonal to the approach.

 5) I think that the terminology and typography (words are capitalized
    at unusual times) could be cleaned up considerably.

I recommend that the draft be added to the IPPCP WG workload, or a new
WG be formed to deal with this specific issue.

[email-masked]
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