Subject: [trill] Protocol Action: 'TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links): Fine-Grained Labeling' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-trill-fine-labeling-07.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 11:47:01 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links): Fine-Grained
   Labeling'
  (draft-ietf-trill-fine-labeling-07.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Transparent Interconnection of Lots
of Links Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Ted Lemon and Brian Haberman.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-trill-fine-labeling/

Technical Summary: 

  The TRILL base protocol supports labeling of TRILL Data packets 
  with up to 4K IDs. However, there are applications that require 
  more fine-grained labeling of data for configurable isolation based 
  on different tenants, service instances, or the like. This document 
  updates TRILL by specifying an optional extension that supports an 
  additional 2**24 labels, called fine-grained labels (FGLs). 
  Provisions for mixed networks of TRILL switches that do and do not 
  support FGLs are provided. 

Working Group Summary: 

  The two primary points of discussion in the WG were how to encode 
  fine grained labels and how to handled mixed networks. 

  Early versions of FGL, for maximum backwards compatibility with the 
  TRILL base protocol, made a non-standard use of an Ethertype 
  assigned to another group as part of FGL encoding, but this ws not 
  allowed by the asignee of that Ethertype. So the encoding was 
  changed to use a new Ethertype allocated for TRILL FGL. After 
  discussion, the consensus of the working group was to use 
  an encoding structure optimized for support by existing fast path 
  silicon, although this is not the most compact encoding. 

  For handling mixed networks, the problem to be solved was how to 
  avoid giving an FGL TRILL Data packet to a TRILL switch not 
  supporting FGL that might mishandle it. The WG decision was to 
  avoid methods that would require silicon changes or additional 
  shortest path calculation, yet have the protocol be robust against 
  mixtures of old and new TRILL switches. 

Document Quality: 

  The document has been reviewed by participants from the TRILL 
  vendors that appear to plan to implement this specification. 
  The document shepherd has reviewed the document in its most recent 
  form. 

Personnel: 

  Erik Nordmark is the Document Shepherd. 
  Ted Lemon is the Responsible Area Director. 

IANA Note

  You will definitely want to process all the IANA considerations
  for draft-ietf-isis-rfc6326bis before attempting to make sense
  of the IANA considerations in this document.