[irs-discuss] Suggestions for IRS Way Forward

[James Kempf <[e-mail]>]

So after seeing part of Alia's talk this morning (I had to leave in the middle unfortunately), I'd like to make a couple suggestions. There were a lot of ideas presented in the talk, enough for an entire IETF Area. I think to make tangible progress, the work needs to be focussed on a small subset that would be of immediate interest and usability. 

There are a couple areas that suggest themselves, but one that would be useful in work that I've been involved in is a standardized format for network topology representation and a protocol for exchanging it. The Onix OpenFlow controller has a network information base with a specialized format for network topology, and every OpenFlow controller requires this. Having a standardized way to represent it might foster a common topology database package. Another application is network management. Every network management system needs some kind of topology representation. Finally, though I am not an expert in PCE construction, it would seem to me that a PCE would need some kind of topology representation in order to perform path calculations. Having a way,for example, for the OpenFlow controller and the PCE to exchange topology information would be really useful.  I would say to start with physical topology because that is fundamental, but make the format flexible enough to support virtual topology representation.

			jak