Re: [decade] Updated DECADE Charter again

[Richard Alimi <[e-mail]>]

Hi Christian,

On Friday 19 March 2010 7:42:04 am Schmidt, Christian 1. (NSN - DE/Munich) 
wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> Some questions/comments regarding the following section:
> > > The Working Group (WG) will have three primary tasks. First, the WG
> 
> will
> 
> > > identify target applications to appropriately scope the problem and
> > > requirements. P2P applications are the primary target, but
> 
> suitability
> 
> > > to other applications with similar requirements may be considered
> > > depending on additional complexity required to support such
> > > applications.
> 
> What application do you have in mind?

We do not have any specific ones in mind, but the objective here was to allow 
other applications to be put on the table, such as suggested in Section 2.1 of 
draft-ohlman-decade-add-use-cases-reqs-00. Since the goal of the WG would be 
to define the architecture for DECADE, I personally think it is fair to allow 
consideration of other use cases.  However, I believe the specific targets 
should be decided relatively early on (certainly before any necessary 
rechartering for protocol development).

That said, I believe we still must be careful: the WG would need to weigh the 
additional complexity required to meet such additional use cases. We wish to 
avoid creating a general-purpose system that is usable for arbitrary 
applications.

> Is it possible to narrow the scope, related to the planned applications?

This is a good question.  One possibility is the following: Any application 
that is considered should have the same overall goal and workload 
characteristics as P2P (namely, content distribution), and the ability to 
implement tasks such as searching, redirection, and replication within the 
application itself (instead of relying on in-network storage for such 
services).  That is, we are not talking about some "cloud storage" service 
here.

> Will the list be included in the problem statement, the requirement
> draft or the survey document?

My feeling is that the target applications should be put in the problem 
statement.

Thanks for the comments!

-- 
Richard Alimi
Department of Computer Science
Yale University