[Pals] Questions regarding draft-schmutzer-bess-ple-00

[Alexander Vainshtein <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,
I have a few questions regarding draft-schmutzer-bess-ple-00<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-schmutzer-bess-ple-00> .

Q1: Clock quality for Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE)
Section 1 of the draft mentions "two Ethernet connected CEs and the need for synchronous Ethernet operation between them" as one of the possible applications of the technology defined in the draft.
I have doubts regarding validity of this solution based on the following:

*         SyncE includes a mechanism for transfer of information about the quality of the clock carried as the bit-stream clock using Ethernet Synchronization Messages (ESMC)

*         My reading of the draft suggests that these messages will be transparently carried by the PLE service between the pair of CEs, so that each CE will receive ESMC messages transmitted by its remote peer without any changes, i.e. each of them will assume that the quality of the clock it receives from the recovered bit-stream is the same as the quality of the original bit-stream

*         However, even with the differential clock technique defined in the draft, preservation of the original clock quality is not guaranteed automatically.
Any comments on this point would be highly appreciated.

Q2: ODUk Frame Boundary Alignment
Section 5.2 of the draft says that, in the case of a PLE that carries ODUk frames, "The used payload size has to be a integer fraction of the full 15296 bytes to allow for ODUk frame alignment" and "The two FRG bits in the PLE control word MUST be used to indicate first, intermediate, and last fragment of the encapsulated ODUk frame". However the draft does not explicitly state that the first octet of the of the ODUk frame MUST be the first octet of the first fragment.

Q3: Bit Order in PLE Encapsulation
I do not see any analog to the following statement copied below from Section 5.1 of RTV 4553 (SAtoP):
   SAToP uses the following ordering for packetization of the TDM data:

      o  The order of the payload bytes corresponds to their order on
         the attachment circuit.

      o  Consecutive bits coming from the attachment circuit fill each
         payload byte starting from most significant bit to least
         significant.
I think that an explicit statement regarding the bit order in the PLE encapsulation is mandatory in order to guarantee interoperability of different implementations.

Hopefully these notes will be useful.

Regards,
Sasha

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