[babel] Shephard's review of draft-ietf-babel-mac-relaxed-03

[Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I did a Shepherd's/Chair's review of this draft and noticed a few things:


The draft needs an IANA Considerations Section as such a section is
mandatory. Sorry I missed this till now. Its contents can simply be

       This document requires no IANA actions.


The draft admirably explains why using an unprotected field, such as
the 802.11 Access Category (AC), to select different PC number spaces
is problematic. But I don't understand why, depending on
implementation, use of different priorities, such as AC, couldn't lead
to excessive discarded packets. Isn't there essentially a requirement
that packet counter numbering happen after any mechanism that can
re-order packets (except unicast/multicast after implementation of
Section 3.1 of the draft). In other words, if you had different
priority streams and the different queues were implemented in firmware
inside your 802.11 chipset, might this not result in many old low
priority packets getting discarded at the receiver when the chipset
got around to sending them after emptying a higher priority queue?
Perhaps I am confused but should there be some comment about this?


The draft probably should not reference "802.11e", which was the
802.11 Amendment that added Access Categories, since it was long ago
merged into the base 802.11 standard and no longer exists as such.
Also, should add an entry to the References, probably Informational,
for IEEE Std 802.11 and use appropriately in the body text. Here is an
example such entry
   [IEEE802.11]
              IEEE standard for Information Technology, "IEEE Standard
      for Information Technology - Telecommunications and
      information exchange between systems Local and
      metropolitan area networks - Specific requirements -
      Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and
      Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications.",
      <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9363693>.
The above may not be exactly right but the RFC Editor will update to
the most recent reference as part of the publication process.


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