[RTG-DIR] Review of draft-ietf-detnet-pof-04 for the RTGDIR

[Henning Rogge <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

Denim Henriques of the RTGDIR secretaries asked me to review the
latest draft-ietf-detnet-pof draft last Thursday. Unfortunately it
seems I already got asked to review an earlier revision of the draft,
but the request got lost (most likely on my side).

I read through draft-ietf-detnet-pof-04 and parts of RFC8655 and I
think the concept of a POF function is pretty straight forward.

When reading through "4.3 The Basic POF Algorithm" I see a couple of
issues that could use clarification (or a fix).

First, I would suggest eliminating the duplicate text what happens
when a packet is forwarded. The fifth bullet point on page 6 already
states what has to be done, so you can remove the POFLastSent update
in the "Then" block of the third bullet point.

Second, I would like to hear a clarification on why POFLastSent is
always set to seq_num when a package is transmitted and not only if
seqnum is larger than POFLastSent. When a package with sequence number
X is forwarded for any reason, everything with a smaller sequence
number than X should be instantly forwarded (order is already being
disrupted anyways).

As an example, if seq_num 10 already has been forwarded and now
seq_num 5 is being forwarded, I would still expect seq_num 7 to 9
going through the POF, which doesn't happen if POFLastSent is reset to
5. If this is correct, I would suggest something like "POFLastSent =
max(POFLastSent, seq_num)" in the algorithm.

Third, the Note on page 6 hints (correctly) that comparison (and
maximum detection) can be done but is a bit tricky in circular
sequence number space. I could not find an example how to handle this
in RFC 8655, so maybe putting an example of how to do it sequence
number overflow in an appendix could improve this document.

Lastly, for the "Advanced POF Algorithm" the path dependent delays
might result in multiple packets triggering the "maximum delay
reached" at exactly the same time. It might be worth writing down that
the transmission order of these packets then should be preserver,
should be done in seq_num order or that it doesn't matter.

Nitpick:
in the description of the POFMaxDelay_i in "5. Control and Management
Plane Parameters for POF" it might be a good idea to mention that this
represents multiple parameters, e.g.

"POFMaxDelay_i" for each possible path i


Henning Rogge