[bmwg] more on draft-feher-bmwg-benchres-term

Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 14:56:03 -0800
From: Kathleen Nichols <nichols@packetdesign.com>
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To: Scott Bradner <sob@harvard.edu>
CC: braden@isi.edu, brian@hursley.ibm.com
Subject: Re: draft-feher-bmwg-benchres-term-01.txt
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Actually draft-ietf-bmwg-benchres-term-02.txt.

Okay, I agree with Bob about it seeming to wander into NSIS
territory (but then NSIS seems to be wandering into all
kinds of territory, so maybe there's some method here).
I also agree with Brian that they seem to see diffserv as
some kind of subset of rsvp-intserv.

It seems odd to me that there is a concern with "different
resource reservation protocols" that includes some stuff
that is in research papers, not IETF RFCs, standards or
informational. Interestingly enough, one of these, Boomerang
shares a first author with this document. I think mentioning
it on a par with RSVP in a WG document is a blantant ploy to
try to create some kind of standards visibility for someone's
research project. And a rather back-handed one. Who is shipping
Boomerang? What IETF WG owns it?

The issues section of 6.1.4 tells us about how Boomerang works.

The issues section of 6.1.5 the last sentence is an opinion
about architectural choices, which seems out of place in
a benchmarking document, particularly one one benchmarking
terminology.

Similarly, I am a bit concerned about the issues section of
6.1.6, but if Bob feels it is appropriate here, I'll bow
to his greater expertise.

Section 6.2.2 talks about Premium Data Packets as those
distinct from Best Effort. The diffserv WG heard a lot
of discussion on a topic that some network operators
believe is important which is to be able to treat data
packets differently from Best effort and *worse* than
best effort. "Premium" is a misnomer in that case.
In the same section, the authors perpetuate a common
mistake by equating multi-field classification to IP
5 tuple or ToS field classification. "Multifield" was
always meant to refer to any arbitrary set of fields
and that's what the diffserv WG docs say. They give the
five-tuple as an *example*.

I found 6.4.2 and 6.4.3 confusing. If a router needs to
classify packets, it has to classify all the packets
that pass through it since it can't know apriori which
are "premium" unless it's done by port or something. Then
"marking" is mentioned in 6.4.3 as if it had already
been discussed. Also, the forwarding time needs to
include scheduling time which is quite variable, but
yet that is not called out here. On the other hand,
this may not be important if it is the resource reservation
capabilities that are being benchmarked. If that's so,
why is this document talking about forwarding time?

It seems like 6.4.4 is actually describing a metric that
ought to be important, given the title of the document.
Thus, the waffle words on time period seem a bit too waffly.
This is a good place to make a recommendation. After all,
there's some time period where the emergence of the
reservation is critical.

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