[Banana] Troublesome Encapsulations

[Margaret Cullen <[e-mail]>]

We seem to be continuing to struggle with the term "BANANA Encapsulations", and I have been thinking about alternatives.  The problem comes up because neither “transport” nor “encapsulation” is the right word, since some of the proposed BANANA approaches use transport-layer mechanisms to split/recombine flows, while others use tunnel-based mechanisms (AKA encapsulations) to split/recombine flows.

What if, instead, we used the term “Bandwidth Aggregation (BA) Mechanism”?  We would define a BA Mechanism to be a transportlayeror encapsulation-layer mechanism that splits a single flow across multiple access networks and restores the traffic to a single flow before it reaches its final destination.  

We could then make it clear that the BANANA signaling protocol should be designed to work with multiple possible BA Mechanisms, perhaps even with multiple BA Mechanisms in use on the same BANANA Box at the same time.

Do you think this change would make the charter clearer?  Or more confusing?  Any other thoughts?

If folks like this general idea, I will suggest explicit charter changes to make it so.

Thanks,
Margaret