Subject: Hearbeat piggy-backing, and typos in protocol draft

From: Evangelos Haleplidis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:35:26 +0200

Greetings to the list,

I'm a Ph.D student at the University of Patras, and I'm currently working
on a prototype implementation of the ForCES protocol in the scope of the
EU FlexiNET project.

My implementation includes at this point association setup and heartbeat
exchanges between a CE and an FE without any LFBs involved (still using
the -01 version of protocol). I had a few comments about the heartbeats:

- It would be good to support some sort of piggy-backing of heartbeats
over other messages. When a PL message arrives at an element, this may
also be treated as a PL heartbeat, as it shows that the sender is indeed
alive.

-  The FE Protocol LFB should have a flag to control this option, so that
the FE knows whether it has to send hearbeat messages periodically, or if
it can skip sending them whenever PL messages have just been sent.

Also, while reading the ForCES protocol draft (-02 version), I found two
typos:

Page 21
-------
Command (8 bits)
//Needs to be changed to
Message Type (8 bits)

Page 29
--------
"The RAWDATA's V will only contain the content SANS the..."
The word SANS is the French "without" or something else?

Regards,
Haleplidis Evangelos

---

From: "Wang,Weiming" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 19:22:11 +0800

Hi Haleplidis Evangelos,

Thank you for the comments. Just reply with my own views regarding your thoughts
inline.

Cheers,
Weiming

----- Original Message -----
From: "Evangelos Haleplidis" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Hearbeat piggy-backing, and typos in protocol draft

> it can skip sending them whenever PL messages have just been sent.
Yes, I think it is valuable to have a try to exploit the generic heartbeat
function from general protocol messages to save resources. It's actually not
very comlex to realize the scheme. To have a heartbeat message acts only as a
gap filler between messages with longer time interval than a predefined period,
and to let the scheme as only one of several heartbeat policies.
I hope this view can be considered by protocol team.