Bob Braden wrote:
Harald,
Here is one more to consider: maybe it is outside the mainstream of the
Internet architecture. [Optimizing to leave IP out of the stack and do
direct L2 communication certainly SOUNDS like a retrograde step to me,
too. Twenty years ago I was arguing with a UCLA professor, who
insisted that IP was too much overhead and that he needed to do direct
LAN transmission to get adequate performance for his distributed file
system. He eventually figured out the fallacy, because the product
produced by his company had the IP layer in place. Have we forgotten
these lessons?]
Bob,
I think not. If you look like what people are working on in this area,
it is all IP-driven:
- at data plane, L2 flows are aggregated through GRE, MPLS... tunnels.
- at control layer, it all IP: LDP, BGP, Radius...
Along with L3VPN, I argue this is mainstream Internet. If there is a
problem, I start to worry if we are overloading some of the protocols.
Well... if it aint broken, why fix it? :-)
If you concern about building nation-wide L2 bridging backbones with
spanning trees running off the roof, :-) so far, I have not seen people
seriously moving toward that direction.
As for IESG, the problem is not about having a new IETF WG. Rather, why
are we spending so much time and energy on standardization? How many
times are people going to write architecture and framework RFC's?
2 cents,
- Ping