Re: [Apn] Further revised draft Charter

[Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]>]

Thanks for doing that work, Donald.

 

I’m not sure what the status of APN is now. It’s all been very quiet since Andrew’s email on the 20th of October. At that time he said “I will have having discussions with the proposed chairs and some of the proponents at 115 regarding the possible way forward from here and will advise in due course” so I guess we’ve been waiting to find out what the next steps are.

 

But I think you’re right to resume the discussions and see whether we have momentum. I’d certainly like to see more clarity around the use cases (really, more simple statements of the problems that need to be solved), so hopefully this will come out of these discussions.

 

I’m looking at your edited text with a view to seeing what might confuse or bother people coming at it from outside the routing and forwarding sphere…

 

The initial couple of paragraphs talk about “services”. “Routing as a service” is something we might be familiar with, but, in general, when people talk about services they are thinking about services provided to traffic flows, to applications, or to users. Looking for an alternative word that might be less likely to cause confusion, I wondered about “treatments”.

 

When you list “routing”, do you really mean “forwarding” or possibly “routing and forwarding”?

 

I think that the paragraphs “The Appropriate Performance Networking (APNET) WG goal…” and “The APNET Field…” may be presenting the work in the wrong order. To me, the order of events seems to be…

1.	Determine use cases where it would be advantageous to access additional information within the network to deliver services such as those listed
2.	Build an information model to list all of the additional information needed
3.	Write a framework for a common (abstract) data plane field/structure to carry this information and how it would be used
4.	Determine whether some or all of the information can be carried in existing fields or encapsulations
5.	Depending on the outcome of 4., devise a common encoding for carrying the necessary information regardless of the data plane in use; and then…
6.	Specify encapsulations to carry the common encoding in different Internet data planes 

 

Given the continued (legitimate) concerns about privacy (and to some extent, security), it would be a good idea to draw this out in an explicit paragraph. Something like…

 

“Privacy and security are of increasing concern for Internet users and for the networks that carry the traffic. Encoding additional information within packets in order that the network can make informed decisions about how to handle the packets will necessarily expose that information to outside observers that may have malign intentions. It is, therefore, a fundamental part of the APNET WG’s work to carefully consider the risks introduced especially in regards to how packet flows and behaviors may be additionally visible to external observers.”

 

It may help to say why inter-domain is out of scope. Is it “…because the objective is the imposition and removal of APNET information at domain boundaries, and therefore inter-domain is out of scope. Further, assignment of meaning to APNET fields is a matter of local domain policy.”?

 

The middle out-of-scope bullet and an additional deliverable could, I believe be extended to cover items 4 and 5 in my list, above.

 

Thanks for the work.

 

Adrian

 

 

From: Apn <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Donald Eastlake
Sent: 18 January 2023 02:04
To: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: [Apn] Further revised draft Charter

 

I've gotten some comments and I've re-read some of the AD DISCUSSES and comments. Based on that I've updated the draft Charter as attached.  Comments are welcome. 




Thanks,
Donald
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 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   [phone] (cell)
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