RE: [Ospf-manet] Re: Ospf-manet Digest, Vol 11, Issue 2

Since you are taking a straw poll...  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Acee Lindem [mailto:acee@cisco.com] 
> Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 10:39 AM
> Cc: ospf-manet@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: [Ospf-manet] Re: Ospf-manet Digest, Vol 11, Issue 2
> 
> 
> Let me summarize where I think we are  - In Dallas I believe 
> we did have
> a "rough" consensus among those actively participated on the OSPF
> wireless design team that the core OSPF MDR algorithm for flooding
> and adjacency reduction should be the approach that we submit to the
> OSPF/MANET WGs for consideration. This didn't include 
> topology reduction
> or some of the other enhancements that are confusing the 
> discussion today.
> We did vastly under estimate the arguments based on factors other than
> those considered by the design team. These arguments came from
> minority members of the design team including some who 
> heretofore hadn't
> participated as well as other interested individuals. These 
> factors include
> computation complexity, deployment momentum, disagreement with the
> problem statement, and possibly even the reluctance or inability
> to understand the MDR draft. Any others?

Disagreement on qualitative design aspects, disagreement on requirements
(principally scenarios of interest), reluctance to rely solely on
simulations for quantitative comparison.

> 
> The question is where we go now. Independent of draft status, 
>  it doesn't
> look like we'll easily reach an agreement.Going forward with multiple 
> drafts
> is one option but everyone should realize that this will also 
> impact future
> optimizations which will undoubtedly be proposed for the 
> contentious OSPF
> MANET interface type.

I think the past week is evidence that we are nowhere near a consensus.
Although several design team members suggested in Dallas to focus on the
MDR framework, I haven't seen any evidence that such a group has
expanded beyond more than perhaps one or two people since that time.
Aside from a few new implementations of the proposals (Aniket's MDR
implementation for OPNET and Kenneth Holter's quagga implementation of
ORs), we also haven't really made any technical progress on any points
of disagreement since then, nor even much discussion on how to try to
resolve these differences, and the debate continues to erode (have we
bottomed out yet?).

Therefore, despite not wanting to arrive at the state where we have
multiple drafts doing very similar things, I don't see how we can
reasonably proceed otherwise at this point.

I do want to return to the methodology question.  Why do we need a
methodology (maybe not a formal methodology but some understanding of
how to move forward)?  Well, at the very least, I'd like to understand
how we will make future technical progress, or whether it will just be
based largely on the level of vendor support, as Joel suggested.  If
simulation results are going to be deprecated, we should understand that
in advance.  On this point, we should be clear that there has long been
a call from the WG to have experimental results and not just simulation
results (I recall Sue Hares voicing this many meetings ago), but no one
has come forward with these to the IETF.  How do we avoid a similar
debate a few years down the road?  

I feel that it is important to at least discuss a way forward to try to
reach one OSPF MANET extension standard because I haven't seen evidence
yet to support the belief that multiple (of these proposals, at least)
are needed.  

Tom

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