[OSPF] Single Hop MANET versus Broadcast/P2MP Hybrid Interface

[Acee Lindem <[e-mail]>]

Speaking as WG Co-Chair,

As many of you remember, we spent a lot of WG time 2004-2007 discussing various OSPF MANET solutions. We were unable to converge on a single solution and ended up with 3 experimental RFCs. It was thought that possibly one day a clear winner would emerge and become a standard. While this may still happen in the future, I don't believe we are there yet and do not feel it would be beneficial to renew the debate.

In Beijing, the hybrid broadcast/P2MP interface was proposed with a radio networks being one of the target environment. This collision with the former work on OSPF MANET elicited much discussion. In Prague, the chairs, authors, and some other interested parties met to specifically address this collision. What we agreed was that the existing OSPF MANET RFCs were the agreed upon solution(s) for MANET environments. The OSPF hybrid interface could still be valuable as a simple adjacency reduction technique on links where broadcast capability was available but not all the links had the same costs. We also agreed that the OSPF MANET mechanisms (with some simplifications) could also handle the single hop case.

Hence, the questions for the WG are:


  1. Do we want to accept draft-nsheth-ospf-hybrid-bcast-and-p2mp-01.txt as a WG document?

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-nsheth-ospf-hybrid-bcast-and-p2mp

  2. Do we wish to allow revisions of the OSPF MANET experimental RFCs to cover the single-hop case (and possibly minor corrections)?

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5449/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5614/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5820/

Note that IPR statements are filed for some of the above.

Thanks,
Acee