Subject: Document Action: 'Benchmarking Terminology for Protection Performance' to Informational RFC

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 15:11:34 -0700 (PDT)

The IESG has approved the following document:

- 'Benchmarking Terminology for Protection Performance '
   <draft-ietf-bmwg-protection-term-09.txt> as an Informational RFC

This document is the product of the Benchmarking Methodology Working Group. 

The IESG contact persons are Ron Bonica and Dan Romascanu.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-bmwg-protection-term-09.txt

Technical Summary

    The purpose of this document is to provide a single terminology for
    benchmarking sub-IP protection mechanisms.

    Technologies that transport IP packets can be designed to provide
    protection for IP traffic by providing the failure recovery at lower
    layers. Possibly, the outage is not even observed at the IP-layer.
    Sub-IP protection technologies include, but are not limited to,
    High Availability (HA) stateful failover, Virtual Router Redundancy
    Protocol (VRRP), Automatic Link Protection (APS) for SONET/SDH,
    Resilient Packet Ring (RPR) for Ethernet, and Fast Reroute for
    Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS-FRR).

    Benchmarking terminology was defined for IP-layer convergence in
    draft-ietf-bmwg-igp-dataplane-conv-term-21 .
    Different terminology and methodologies specific to
    benchmarking sub-IP layer protection mechanisms are required.  The
    metrics for benchmarking the performance of sub-IP protection
    mechanisms are measured at the IP layer, so that the results are
    independent of the specific protection mechanism being used.

Working Group Summary

    Working group consensus was smoothly achieved over a period of
    several years, with many controversies ironed-out before WG adoption.
    Several authors came and went, but others were willing to pick-up the
    work and complete it, so here we are.

Document Quality

Q - Are there existing implementations of the protocol?

A  these documents neither propose a new protocol nor extend any existing
one, hence current implementations are not required to support this
document. The document only attempts to standardize the benchmarking
strategies so that service providers could evaluate multiple protection
implementations using standard figures of merit with an aim of
producing consistent test results across multiple platforms.

Q - Have a significant number of vendors indicated their plan to
implement
the specification?

A - Several test vendors, including the leading ones, have
shown their support and interest in the execution of these methodologies.
The authors have regularly acknowledged them in WG status presentations.

Reference/acknowledgements were shared in the following:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/06jul/slides/bmwg-3/bmwg-3.ppt

Q - Are there any reviewers that merit special mention as having done a
thorough review, e.g., one that resulted in important changes or a
conclusion that the document had no substantive issues?

A - The following lays down the history of this work item, which
demonstrates substantial revisions of the documents based on comments form
the BMWGers

1.  July 2005: Common protection terminology created due to merger of
draft-kimura-protection-term-02.txt and
draft-poretsky-mpls-protection-meth-02 as result of series of reviews and
comments. New draft-poretsky-protection-term-00.txt created.

2.  December 2005: another effort with additional test scenarios
(draft-vapiwala-bmwg-frr-failover-meth-00.txt) was merged into
draft-poretsky-meth-05. It was felt that additional scenarios proposed
were
needed to offer comprehensive MPLS (including the services) based
protection
techniques evaluation. Terms checked against this new methodology.

3.  June 2006: Due to additional test items proposal, a new draft was
created  draft-papneja-mpls-protection-meth-merge-00.txt

4.  Also in the combined effort Mr. Vapiwala were included as one of the
co-authors due to his contribution to the effort in the form of additional
test scenarios for the methodology document, and accordingly updating the
terminology document.

5.  The acknowledgement section is included for terminology document to
thank those who significantly helped in shaping the final version. The
document did receive comments from one of co-authors of original fast
reroute RFC 4090 in the early versions of the work item document in
addition
to other pioneers in the MPLS field.

Personnel

Al Morton is shepherd.