Subject: Communication respone re: Intra-Carrier E-NNI Routing Using OSPF

From: Kireeti Kompella <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 12:09:55 -0800 (PST)

From: Kireeti Kompella & Adrian Farrel, IETF CCAMP Working Group Chairs
 To: Mr. Steve Joiner, OIF Technical Committee Chair
 Cc: Jim Jones,        OIF Architecture/Signaling Working Group Chair
 Cc: John McDonough,   OIF Liaison to ITU-T SG15
 Cc: Alex Zinin,       IETF Routing Area Director
 Cc: Bill Fenner,      IETF Routing Area Director
 Regarding: OIF intra-carrier E-NNI routing work
 Date:     March 19, 2004
 Reply by: April 30, 2004

Dear Steve,

Thank you for your communication regarding the current status of OIF
signaling and routing work, and the associated documentation.  This
communication is in response.  As there is no formal liaison
relationship yet between the IETF and the OIF, this communication is
not treated as a liaison; hopefully, this situation will be rectified
soon.

Thank you too for allowing Mr. Lyndon Ong to present a synopsis of
the work going on at the OIF with regard to Intra-carrier E-NNI
routing.  It was both useful and enlightening.

However, both of these gave us cause for alarm, on two fronts:
a) The development of new or modified code points and procedures
   in OSPF without expert review from the OSPF WG in the IETF
   contravenes IETF procedure, especially as the IETF pays special
   attention to changes in protocols in the Routing Area, such as
   OSPF.
b) The development of routing for optical networks without expert
   review from the CCAMP WG is also a source of concern, especially
   in the light of an on-going cooperative effort between the ITU-T
   and the IETF.  This effort has identified several gaps between
   GMPLS routing extensions and ASON routing requirements; once this
   task is complete, further routing extensions will be defined to
   fill these gaps.  Experimental extensions from the OIF in the
   context of an interoperability demo will only serve to confuse
   the industry and hinder the progress of standards.

Mr. Ong's emphasis that this work was experimental and purely for the
purpose of testing alleviated some of our concerns.  It would be very
helpful to hear this officially from the OIF; furthermore, in the
interests of openness and full disclosure, we would strongly urge the
modification of a paragraph in the Introduction of the draft routing
document OIF2003.259 as follows:

   "The base protocol as defined by this document is OSPF with
    extensions for Traffic Engineering and GMPLS.  This document
    proposes to use GMPLS-OSPF to operate at each hierarchical
    level, with multiple such levels stacking up to form the
    routing hierarchy.  Extensions have been defined in the forms
    of (sub-) TLVs to accommodate the requirements as defined in the
    G.8080, G.7715, and G.7715.1.  Note that these extensions as
    currently specified are purely for the purpose of experimentation
    and testing; in particular, they have not yet been reviewed by
    the OSPF and CCAMP Working Groups in the IETF.  Furthermore they
    use experimental codepoints, and as such must not be used in
    production deployments."

Mr. Ong also brought to our attention that the OIF will be holding
an interoperability demonstration of this specification at the
SuperComm in June 2004.  Due to the preliminary nature of this
specification, the IETF would strongly recommend that the words
OSPF, OSPF-TE and GMPLS not be used in the context of this
demonstration, nor that there be any implication that this work
has been reviewed or sanctioned by the IETF.

It would be helpful in determining the future relationship between
the IETF and the OIF to understand how the OIF intends to progress
this document.

 o Is this intended to become an Implementation Agreement in
   something close to its current form?

 o Does the OIF intend to submit this as a submission in the ITU-T
   SG15 to become a Recommendation?

 o Does the OIF intend to submit this document as an Internet Draft
   to become an IETF RFC?

Thank you for your attention in this matter, and for initiating this
dialogue.  We hope that this develops into a fruitful relationship.
To that end, we enclose a product of the joint work between the
ITU-T and the IETF on Routing Requirements for ASON.  This is a
work in progress, and we solicit your comments:
 - to identify any requirements that the OIF has over and above those
    requirements established by the ITU-T ASON model
 - to ensure that the solution developed within the IETF addresses
    the requirements of both the ITU-T and OIF.

We hope that your feedback will signal the beginning of an active
cooperation between the IETF and the OIF.

Sincerely,
Kireeti Kompella
Adrian Farrel

<attachment: current version of GMPLS ASON Routing Requirements doc>

Kireeti.
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