Re: [MEXT] [WGLC] draft-ietf-mext-flow-binding-03

["Laganier, Julien" <julienl at qualcomm.com>]

Folks,

Please find below my _individual_ WGLC comments:

As we've discussed in the past I think the terminology is misleading and we had agreed to fix it. The draft hasn't been updated since then, however, so I'm repeating my comments in the WGLC. 

The current flow description can catches traffic to many destination, e.g., HTTP traffic to any destination, yet the current definition of flow talks about packet exchanged between two nodes: 

      Flow: A flow is identified as a set of data packets that are
      exchanged between two nodes and match a given flow description

I think it is fair to say that the basic object that this specification manipulates is a "bunch of flows" rather than a flow. So I think we should make the following easy change and renaming in our definitions and terminology, it will make the specification more consistent and easier to read without entailing changes to the protocol mechanism:

   Flow: 

         (something ala RFC 2460, e.g.) a sequence of packets
         sent from a particular source to a particular (unicast
         or multicast) destination for which a MN desires 
         special handling by intervening MIPv6 peers, being it
         the HA or the CN.
 
   Flow Description -> Traffic Description/Selector (I don't care which one we pick, traffic selector is used by IPsec already with exactly the same meaning that here): 

         a piece of information that identifies one or more flows.
         The identification is based on various fields of the 
         network and transport layer headers, such as the source
         address, the destination port, the protocol number, the 
         DSCP value, etc.

   Flow Identification -> Traffic Identification

   Flow Identifier -> Traffic Identifier: 

         an unsigned integer used as a reference to a particular
         Traffic Description/Selector.

   Flow Binding -> Traffic Binding: 

        an association between a traffic description/selector and 
        an action (Forward or Discard).  An IP packet that matches 
        the traffic description/selector will be processed according
        to the action.

Note above, the Flow identifier doesn't need to be included in the definition of a binding. Also I prefer to use "Forward" rather than "n-cast", since Forward is clear and does not necessarily imply that the packet is only forwarded in one direction.

--julien