Subject: RE: [Ans-research] The Charter

From: "Yang, Lily L" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2003 11:42:43 -0700

I wasn't able to attend the BAR BOF -- personally I would like to understand
how, among many interesting topics, scalability was chosen to be the one
focus for this research group. Is that because people perceive the
difficulty to scale ad hoc network into thousands or millions of nodes as
the next biggest obstacle we face today in deploying such network? I would
think there are many other challenges like QoS, self-configuration, seamless
integration with the wired network, etc. -- even just for small to medium
size networks -- that are more urgent but have not been adequately addressed
in the research community. I was certainly hoping to see this group as a
forum to discuss all these challenges in addition to scalability. Elizabeth
suggested these topics can be discussed from the angle of how these interact
with scalability issue. But my concern is that it is premature to discuss
these issues for large networks while we don't even have good handle on them
for small to medium size networks. 

Another concern I have on focusing on scalability is how this overlap with
the current charter of the IETF MANET group. At the San Francisco MANET
meeting, there was quite a heated disucssion without much resolution on how
the MANET group proceed on standardizing one or two routing protocols for ad
hoc networks. One of the suggestion is to come up with a set of network
scenarios and evaluation metric so that fair evalution can be done on the
existing protocols. This sounds a bit similar to what the ANS group is about
to do as the first step, but of course with a focus on scalability. However,
it wasn't clear to me whether scalability is one of the concern when
evalauting the existing protocols produced by the MANET group in its effort
to standardize one or two. So maybe the chairs of these two groups can
explain exactly how the line is divided here between the work done by two
groups?

Overall I believe it is a good thing for the IETF MANET group to become very
focus and engineering-oriented, but on the same time, I hope the ANS group
can be more open in accomodating the research needs that are clearly outside
of MANET but have been actively purseud by many people in the community.

I post this to both groups because of the nature of my questions.

Lily

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elizabeth M. Belding-Royer [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 9:12 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: [Ans-research] The Charter
> 
> 
> It is my understanding that IRTF group charters do not have
> to be "strictly" adhered to in the sense that IETF charters 
> do.  In that sense, you can take the charter goal of scalable
> ad hoc networks rather loosely.  So then, any ideas that will
> help improve the scalability of ad hoc networks are welcome.
> Hence, cross-layer interactions, addressing mechanisms, protocols
> (new or rehashed), etc. are all welcome ideas if the end goal
> is to improve the scalability of the network (of course, what
> scalable means is what we are still working on).
> 
> Another point to note is that scalability can be looked at
> in a number of different areas.  Routing, QoS, reliability,
> etc. are all important topics because they can also affect the
> scalability of the network.  So Sukanta was right when he said
> no topics have really received a red flag, except for security.
> As long as the focus of the group remains narrow enough that 
> we are still able to make progress then I think we are headed
> in the right direction.
> 
> Elizabeth
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ans-research mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ans-research
> 
_______________________________________________
Ans-research mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ans-research