[Time] Editor's proposed draft of TIME/LIME Problem Statement

[Tom Taylor <[e-mail]>]

Qin Wu drafted me as editor of the Problem Statement I-D.

There has been a lot of activity behind the scenes. When I  was brought 
into the picture, I was given a version -03 of 
draft-ww-opsawg-multi-layer-oam as a starting point. This built on the 
published -02 version but had a lot more text up front and in the future 
work section. It also dropped "Architecture" from the title, removing it 
as a focus.

My view was that the Problem Statement had to be tightly focussed 
precisely on that topic, and the future work section would become the 
core of a gap analysis document. This view was accepted. As a result, I 
have prepared an Editor's Proposal, 
draft-edprop-opsawg-multi-layer-oam-ps-00, which I plan to submit on 
Monday after some people have looked it over. It is much stripped down 
from the original text and has a lot of new text, but I hope it is not a 
shock to TIME/LIME participants. A key issue was extremely careful 
attention to terminology and nuances of meaning.

The concluding Problem Statement section is fairly brief, so I'll quote 
it here:

5.  Problem Statement

    Operators have a need for a management subsystem satisfying the
    objectives stated in Section 3.  The analysis presented above
    indicates that the solution lies in the direction of a consolidated
    management function that operates in the first instance on a
    technology and layer independent view of network and service
    performance.

    There is value in attempting to define an architecture for
    consolidated management that may reasonably be argued to meet the
    stated objectives.  If this attempt succeeds, it can be followed up
    with a gap analysis, which in turn will define a further program of
    standardization.

    At the detailed level, Section 4.3.1 and Section 4.3.2 deal with the
    matter of abstraction and its relationship to the specification of
    YANG modules.  This is work beyond the initial definition of
    architecture and awaits justification and prioritization by the gap
    analysis.  A similar consideration relates to the solution to the
    ECMP problem.

    The remaining issue is the OAM interworking issue identified in
    Section 4.3.3.  This is architectural in nature, and should be
    addressed by the proposed work on architecture.

Tom Taylor