Subject: [mpls] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-mpls-oam-requirements-06.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 18:50:02 -0400

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Multiprotocol Label Switching Working Group of the IETF.

	Title		: OAM Requirements for MPLS Networks
	Author(s)	: T. Nadeau, et al.
	Filename	: draft-ietf-mpls-oam-requirements-06.txt
	Pages		: 15
	Date		: 2005-7-21
	
As transport of diverse traffic types such as voice, frame
   relay, and ATM over MPLS become more common, the ability to detect, 
   handle and diagnose control and data plane defects becomes 
   critical. 

   Detection and specification of how to handle those defects is not 
   only important because such defects may not only affect the 
   fundamental operation of an Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)
   network, but also because they MAY impact service level specification 
   commitments for customers of that network.

   This document describes requirements for user and data
   plane operations and management for MPLS.
   These requirements have been gathered
   from network operators who have extensive experience deploying
   MPLS networks, similarly some of these 
   requirements have appeared in other documents. This draft specifies
   Operations and Management requirements for Multi-Protocol Label 
   Switching, as well as for applications of Multi-Protocol Label
   Switching such as pseudowire voice and virtual private network 
   services. Those interested in specific issues relating to 
   instrumenting    MPLS for Operations 
   and Management purposes are directed to the Multi-Protocol Label 
   Switching Architecture specification.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 11:43:50 +0100

Colleagues,

Following a very quick scan of draft-ietf-mpls-oam-requirements-06, I
have the following comments/suggestions.

1) In the abstract & introduction the document refers to "requirements
for user and data plane operations and management", in later sections
reference is made to "MPLS data plane".  The usage of such terms appear
to be inconsistent to me.  I tend to interpret 'user plane' to mean the
plane along which user data is transferred and 'data plane' to mean the
data forwarding plane of any plane - i.e. data plane can be used to
refer to the data forwarding plane of the user plane, or the data
forwarding plane of the control plane, or the data forwarding plane of
the management plane.  However I get the impression from the document
that user plane == data plane.

So I would suggest that either the document standardises on one term for
(what I would call) the user plane, or that the terminology section is
expanded to highlight the difference between what is meant by user plane
Vs data plane.

2) The document refers to "customer traffic" and "user traffic".  Is
customer traffic synonymous with user traffic, in which case I would
suggest that the document standardises on one term.

3) Furthermore, I am not sure what is meant by customer - I assume what
is meant is the client layer of the MPLS (server) layer, in which case I
would comment that this client layer does not necessarily belong to a
"customer".  I would suggest either replacing customer with a less
ambiguous term (e.g. client or client layer) or that the terminology
section be expanded to include a definition of what is meant by customer
and how this differs from a client layer that is not owned by a customer
(e.g. a SP may use a label stack to help scaling/aggregation, but the
same SP owns the client & server MPLS layers, so who is the customer?).

4) Section 4.5, insofaras => insofar as

Thanks
Ben

-- 
Ben Niven-Jenkins
Networking Specialist, BT Exact
  
E-mail: [email-masked] 
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