Subject: [alto] Shepherd writeup for path-vector (draft)

From: Vijay Gurbani <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2020 11:36:21 -0600

All: I have started the shepherd review of path-vector  The review is below.

The token is with me to do a chair/shepherd review of the draft.  With the
semester coming to a close and grading to do, etc., I have reserved the
week starting Dec-16 to do the shepherd review of the draft.

In the meantime, please go through the draft shepherd writeup and let me
know if I have erred anywhere.

Thanks,

- vijay
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Shepherd writeup for draft-ietf-alto-path-vector-13

1. Summary.

The document shepherd is Vijay K. Gurbani, and the responsible area
director is Martin Duke.

The document is a Standards Track document, targeted as a Proposed
Standard.  The WG has chosen the requested publication type since this
draft extends the base ALTO protocol in a normative manner.  Specifically,
the document seeks to extend the base ALTO protocol (RFC 7285) to provide
the concept of "Abstract Network Elements" (ANE).  ANEs are an abstraction
of physical network components --- routers, etc. --- that handle (switch)
packets.  An application whose performance may be impacted by a particular
traversal path in the network may wish to consult the ANEs to determine an
optimized path to the destination.

This draft is a major conceptual advance in the abstractions provided by
the base ALTO protocol.

2. Review and consensus.
This work is mature.  It started off as an individual submission in March
2015, and was adopted as a WG deliverable in May 2017.  A detailed review
of this draft was provided early on by Sabine Randriamasy [1,2,3] shortly
after it was adopted.  Version -04 was further reviewed by Danny Perez [4]
and Qiao Xiang [5] in 2018, and the work progressed appreciably between
2018 and 2019, resulting in the release of -09 in November 2019.

A WGLC was initiated on Sep-28-2020, and a review was provided by Qiao
Xiang [6] and Luis Contreras [7] on version -11.  Version -12 included the
comments from Qiao and Luis, with version -13 following with some minor
revisions.

Earlier versions of path-vector have been implemented (without the
integration of unified-props); the implementation was used in a super
computing conference demonstration for OpenFlow-based networks [8].  The
latest version of path-vector is being implemented and will be open-sourced
on GitHub [9].

The shepherd has an action item to review version -13.

3. Intellectual property
All of the authors have confirmed with the shephered that they are not
aware of any IPR filed with respect to the draft.

4. Other points
IDNits reports 1 error, 7 warnings, and 2 comments.

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/IQ0WwgWewFKJkvzZSIQRhkiN-hc/
[2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/4wa_kXE4GUrigZ33TBCVVuwBuiw/
[3] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/GGroJgfL5XGuH1ydWOLmISCPMKY/
[4] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/HSGkZ2o4JvneiiYiVSGcCZjDVSQ/
[5] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/qnIBXzFEiYxMDm9kvHLH53qbn_Y/
[6] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/uwFNjekGcc3zMdSKleHU7eIdsW4/
[7] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/D5jkRGws2c75paw6yP8_5_40ViY/
[8] https://github.com/openalto/mercator-setup
[9] https://github.com/openalto/sextant