1. Summary.
The document shepherd is Vijay K. Gurbani, and the responsible area director is
Martin Duke.
The document is a Standards Track document, targeted as a Proposed Standard.
The WG has chosen the requested publication type since this draft extends the
base ALTO protocol in a normative manner. Specifically, the document seeks to
extend the base ALTO protocol (RFC 7285) to provide the concept of "Abstract
Network Elements" (ANE). ANEs are an abstraction of physical network components
--- routers, etc. --- that handle (switch) packets. An application whose
performance may be impacted by a particular traversal path in the network may
wish to consult the ANEs to determine an optimized path to the destination.
This draft is a major conceptual advance in the abstractions provided by the
base ALTO protocol.
2. Review and consensus.
This work is mature. It started off as an individual submission in March 2015,
and was adopted as a WG deliverable in May 2017. A detailed review of this
draft was provided early on by Sabine Randriamasy [1,2,3] shortly after it was
adopted. Version -04 was further reviewed by Danny Perez [4] and Qiao Xiang [5]
in 2018, and the work progressed appreciably between 2018 and 2019, resulting in
the release of -09 in November 2019.
A WGLC was initiated on Sep-28-2020, and a review was provided by Qiao Xiang [6]
and Luis Contreras [7] on version -11. Version -12 included the comments from
Qiao and Luis, with version -13 following with some minor revisions.
Earlier versions of path-vector have been implemented (without the integration
of unified-props); the implementation was used in a super computing conference
demonstration for OpenFlow-based networks [8]. The latest version of
path-vector is being implemented and will be open-sourced on GitHub [9].
3. Intellectual property
All of the authors have confirmed with the shephered that they are not aware of
any IPR filed with respect to the draft.
4. Other points
IDNits reports:
Summary: 0 errors (**), 0 flaws (~~), 6 warnings (==), 3 comments (--).
Please fix as part of AUTH48.
[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/IQ0WwgWewFKJkvzZSIQRhkiN-hc/
[2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/4wa_kXE4GUrigZ33TBCVVuwBuiw/
[3] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/GGroJgfL5XGuH1ydWOLmISCPMKY/
[4] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/HSGkZ2o4JvneiiYiVSGcCZjDVSQ/
[5] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/qnIBXzFEiYxMDm9kvHLH53qbn_Y/
[6] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/uwFNjekGcc3zMdSKleHU7eIdsW4/
[7] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/alto/D5jkRGws2c75paw6yP8_5_40ViY/
[8] https://github.com/openalto/mercator-setup
[9] https://github.com/openalto/sextant