Subject: [alto] Short summary of recharter discussions on 3 items

From: "Y. Richard Yang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 11:55:54 -0400

Dear ALTOers,

This is a brief update on the last two meetings. One focus was the
rechartering items, and please see below for the discussion of three items.
Please consider them definitely as *work in progress*, and the goal of
posting them early is to better engage.

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- Extension of ALTO to support cellular network use cases. The working
group will extend ALTO information services to expose to mobile
clients/applications about cellular network information, including general
base station network information (e.g., spectrum allocation status) and
network information on the links between the UE and the network (e.g.,
CSI). The extension should clearly address security issues including
authentication, authorization, and confidentiality about UE and network
information.

- Extension of ALTO to support east-west settings. The current ALTO
framework receives network information from a single server, but the
network devices (resources) traversed by a flow can consist of a sequence
of network devices divided into segments, whose information can be managed
by a sequence of ALTO servers. The working group will extend the ALTO
framework to introduce capabilities to identify the full path (i.e., who
provides the segment information), query the segments (e..g, identify
segments of a path), and aggregate the information (e.g., standardize
single aggregation in some settings, and more flexible aggregation such as
non-dominant aggregation of high dimension using route algebra). The
working group should consider realistic complexities such as some segments
may not be identifiable, some segments may not have ALTO servers providing
information, some segments may not provide the desired information, and
dynamicity. The design should consider security issues such as access
control policies, authorization (e.g., an ALTO server provides information
for a network that the server has no authorization).

- Best practice documentation and extension of ALTO for operation
automation. Operating an ALTO server can be complex, and the automation of
the operations of the ALTO services can be highly valuable. The operations
of an ALTO server includes decisions on the set of information resources
(e.g., what metrics, how they are divided into multiple entries) exposed in
the information resource directory (IRD), population (maybe proactive and
reactive) of the content of the services (e.g., pull the backend, or
trigger just-in-time measurements), and aggregation/processing of the
collected information to give clients the proper response. The working
group will investigate the best practices in ALTO operations automation,
including interop/interfaces/protocols with routing systems and measurement
tools.