Subject: new rev of framework draft, please comment

From: "Yang, Lily L" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 17:42:06 -0700

Hi, all

After hearing back from the list, I've incorporated most of the comments
into this new version. Please take a look and provide feedback. I will wait
a bit before submitting this version.

Summary of changes since ver02:
1) Per suggestion from Jamal, the following is added at the end of Section 3
(Introduction):
        "Whenever necessary, this document uses many examples to illustrate
the issues and/or possible solutions in ForCES. These examples are intended
to be just examples, and should not be taken as the only or definite ways of
doing certain things. It is expected that separate document will be produced
by the ForCES working group to specify the ForCES protocol(s)."

2) Per suggestion from Jeelani and others about the "off-loaded functions",
the following is added at the end of Section 3 (Introduction):
        "For performance or scalability reasons, portions of the control
plane functions that need faster response may be moved from the CEs and
off-loaded onto the FEs. For example in OSPF, the Hello protocol packets are
generated and processed periodically. When done at CEs, the inbound Hello
packets have to traverse from the external interfaces at the FEs to the CEs
via the internal CE-FE channel. Similarly, the outbound Hello packets have
to go from the CEs to the FEs and to the external interfaces. Frequent Hello
updates place heavy processing overhead on the CEs and can overwhelm the
CE-FE channel as well. Since typically there are far more FEs than CEs in a
router, when off-loaded, the Hello packets are processed in a much more
distributed and scalable fashion.

        Once off-loaded onto the forwarding plane, such CE functions, even
though logically belong to the control plane, now become part of the FE
logical functions. Just like the other logical functions performed by FEs
(e.g., IPv4 forwarding, classification, etc.), such off-loaded functions
must be expressed as part of the FE model so that the CEs can take advantage
of these off-loaded functions when present on the FEs."

3) Per suggestion from Ram Gopal, the explicit security exchange is deleted
from the message exchange example (Fig 9) in Section 4.2.2.

4) More editorial changes here and there. All minor.

Thanks,
Lily

 <<draft-ietf-forces-framework-03.txt>>

---

From: Robert Haas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 09:32:11 +0200

Lily,
I see you added some text regarding "Off-loaded functions" into section 5.6.
"Application Layer -- Routing Protocols". This restricts the purpose of off-loaded
functions to routing, i.e. OSPF Hello processing. In fact, as suggested in my
previous note, parts of ICMP or TCP processing could as well be off-loaded into the
FE. Could you please update the draft to make sure that no such restriction is placed
on the type of off-loaded functions ?

Thanks,
-Robert

"Yang, Lily L" wrote:

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--
Robert Haas
IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
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CH-8803 Rüschlikon/Switzerland
phone +41-1-724-8698  fax +41-1-724-8578  http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~rha