Subject: Discussion on Multi-technology protection/restoration schemes

From: JP Vasseur <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 09:50:08 -0500

Dear WGs,

Raymond Zhang, Jean-Louis Le Roux and myself have been discussing for  
a while about the idea of the formation of a new Working Group at the  
IETF (under the OPS area) in order to discuss operational issues  
related to the use of multi-technologies in the context of protection/ 
restoration. This was motivated by a number of discussions that we  
had with Service Providers expressing some interest in this topic.

For the sake of illustration,
     (1) How to use Fast IGP in conjunction with MPLS TE FRR ?
     (2) How to use Graceful Restart with Fast IGP or IPFRR ?
     (3) Multi-technology protection/restoration OAM
      - ...

Indeed, there are many cases where such protection/restoration/HA  
technologies may interact thus triggering potential race conditions  
if not used appropriately.

The aim of such potential Working Group would be to discuss these  
issues, document deployment models, ... and potentially come up with  
problem statements leading to new protocol requirements. Note that  
the goal of such WG would NOT be to work on protocol extensions but  
to analyze the problems statements, document combination  
strategies, ... Protocol extensions would be worked out in other WGs  
(likely in Routing area).

We had a first informal meeting in Vancouver with: Bruno Decraene  
(FT), Eiji Oki (NTT), Yuichi Ikejiri (NTT), Kenji Kumaki (KDDI),  
Javier Achirica (Telefonica), Deborah Brungard (ATT), Jaime Miles  
(Level 3) and Alberto Tempia (Telecom Italia), Jean-Louis and myself.  
In this meeting, we got positive feed-back on the usefulness of this  
work.

In the meantime we also received positive feed-back from a number of  
other Service Providers.

A short ID should be posted soon proposing a problem statement.

The OPS Area Directors (Bert and David) gave us the approval to  
create a mailing list to see whether this topic is of interest to the  
IETF community in which case a BOF may be approved for the next IETF.  
If you are interested, please join the mailing list and contribute to  
this work.
     [email-masked]: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mter

Thanks.

JP, Jean-Louis and Raymond.