Liaison statement
Proposed IETF BFD WG Work on Ethernet LAG

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State Posted
Submitted Date 2012-03-06
From Group RTG
From Contact Stewart Bryant
To Group IEEE-802-1
To Contacts Tony Jeffree <tony@jeffree.co.uk>
Cc Eric Gray <Eric.Gray@Ericsson.com>
The IETF Chair <chair@ietf.org>
The IESG <iesg@ietf.org>
David Ward <dward@cisco.com>
Jeffrey Haas <jhaas@pfrc.org>
Stewart Bryant <stbryant@cisco.com>
Adrian Farrel <adrian@olddog.co.uk>
Eric Gray <eric.gray@ericsson.com>
Dan Romascanu <dromasca@avaya.com>
IETF Liaison Archive <statements@ietf.org>
Response Contact Stewart Bryant <stbryant@cisco.com>
Purpose For information
Attachments (None)
Liaisons referring to this one Liaison response to IETF regarding Proposed IETF BFD WG work on Ethernet LAG
Body 
Response Contacts:
Stewart Bryant, IETF Routing Area Director, <stbryant@cisco.com>
Adrian Farrel, IETF Routing Area Director, <adrian@olddog.co.uk>
IETF Liaison Archive, <statements@ietf.org>

Purpose: For Information

Title: Proposed IETF BFD WG Work on Ethernet LAG
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We would like to draw your attention to a topic that has been raised in the
IETF's Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) working group.

Operators and vendors are considering how to load-balance IP over the members
of an Ethernet LAG that is presented as a single IP interface. As part of this,
there is a suggestion to run IP/UDP-encapsulated BFD over each of the group
members and to use the Ethernet LAG identifiers as identifiers in the BFD
message exchanges.

This is not currently working group work, and it falls outside the current
scopeof the BFD working group's charter
(http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/bfd/charter/). However, we anticipate that
there will be discussion of the topic at the IETF's meeting in Paris during the
week of 25th March 2012.

The starting point for the discussion in Paris is likely to be an
Internet-Draft that can be found at
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mmm-bfd-on-lags. We must emphasize that
this is an Individual I-D that does not represent the consensus view of the
working group and is not even a working item of the working group.
Additionally, it is a first version of the draft and might need considerable
additional work.

At this stage we would welcome your preliminary views on the topic, and (of
course) welcome participation at the meeting in Paris or on the BFD working
group's mailing list that can be accessed from the charter page (above). We are
particularly interested to understand what parameters and constraints we need
to set on this work within the IETF such that we can deliver the required
technical functionality without overlapping the technical work that the IEEE
considers its own purview.

We will send you a further liaison after the Paris meeting to keep you informed
of progress and to let you know our plans.

Stewart Bryant and Adrian Farrel,
IETF Routing Area Directors