Subject: [Actn] (no subject)

From: Leeyoung <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2014 20:46:45 +0000

Hi,

I hope your summer break was a good one.

We'd like to give you some updates and plans on the ACTN work. We are going to request a formal BoF in Honolulu IETF meeting. In doing so, we need a charter draft as part of the due diligence. Here's an initial charter draft developed by the small set of proponents of the work based on the discussions and use-cases and other published documents.  We hope this captures a workable ACTN scope.  This version 1.0 draft charter is also posted in the wiki: https://sites.google.com/site/actnbof/home/charter-propor

Your review and comment will be greatly appreciated to come up with a good charter developed by the community of interest.

Best regards,
Young (on behalf of the proponents)

-------------------------------draft charter 1.0 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transport networks have a variety of mechanisms to:

-       Facilitate separation of data plane and control plane,

-       Allow for distributed or centralized signaling  for path setup and protection, and

-       Provide traffic engineering mechanism via centralized path computation.

These represent key technologies for enabling flexible and dynamic networking, and efficient control and recovery of resources. Although these technologies provide significant benefits within a single domain control boundary, they do not meet the growing need for transport network virtualization in multi-domain transport networks. More and more network operators are building and operating on multi-domain transport networks. These domains (collections of links and nodes) may be each of a different technology, administrative zones, or vendor-specific islands. Establishment of end-to-end connections spanning multiple domains is a perpetual problem for operators because of both operational concerns (control plane and management plane) and interoperability issues (control plane and data plane).  Due to these issues, new services that require connections that traverse multiple domains need significant planning and often manual operations to interface different vendor equipment and technology.

The aim of Abstraction and Control of Transport Networks (ACTN) is to facilitate a centralized virtual network operation: the creation of a virtualized environment allowing operators to view and control multi-subnet, multi-technology, multi-vendor domain networks. Abstraction of transport networks also allows operators to consolidate their network services into multi-tenant virtual transport networks. This will enable rapid service deployment of new dynamic and elastic services, and will improve overall network operations and scaling of existing services. Discussion with operators has also highlighted a need for virtual network operation based on the abstraction of underlying technology and vendor domains.

Multi-domain network coordination function in ACTN is built on a control hierarchy where a multi-domain coordinator interacts with each domain controller (e.g., EMS/NMS, GMPLS/PCE control plane, SDN controller) for abstracting network resource information to provide virtual network control functions. This virtual network control functions are embedded in a multi-domain network coordinator to support various services/clients/applications to create and manage their own virtual networks that share the common transport network resources.

The ACTN working group will work to develop a high-level architecture for transport network abstraction and control that facilitates seamless vertical service coordination across multi-tenant customers (primarily internal service organizations with respect to a network operator), the virtual network control and the physical network domain controls as well as a horizontal E2E service coordination across multi-domain networks. It will identify key building components and the corresponding interfaces among these components.  The architecture work will lead to requirements for information models and protocol extensions between the virtual network controller and the physical network domain controllers and between the virtual network controller and multi-tenant customer controllers. Well-defined use cases from operators perspective with clearly stated need for transport network virtualization are critical in scoping the work and thus to achieve the deliverables of the working group.

The working group will work on the following items:

-       High-level architecture that describes the basic building blocks to enable transport network virtualization to support use cases.

-       Operator-driven use cases to address the following initial items:

o    Virtual network control and operation for core transport Packet Optical Integration (POI). (e.g., MPLS-TP, OTN/WSON)

o    Virtual network control and operation for mobile backhaul multi-technology transport (e.g., MPLS-TP and MPLS/OTN)

o    Data Center Operator's interconnection with optical transport network infrastructure providers to support dynamic virtual circuit services.

o    Multi-tenant support to allow virtual network information query, virtual network negotiation, creation/deletion and modification.

o    Synchronization of network resources view across physical domain controls and virtual network control.

o    Dynamic service control and monitoring across all entities.

Initial work within the working group will be limited to a single operator administrative domain with an exception for the Data Center operation use case.

-       Evaluation of Information model/data model to support the use cases.

-       Requirements to support APIs/protocols, encoding languages, and data models

-       Gap analysis of existing IETF and other protocols, encoding languages and data models to fulfill the requirements.

-       Protocol extensions (if necessary after re-chartering).

The working group will determine if new protocol extensions are necessary. If the working group determines they are necessary, then it will develop the new protocols within the working group where necessary, while interacting with other working groups to enhance existing protocols where possible.