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- ST and Connection IP Working Group
- Chairperson: Claudio Topolcic/BBN
-
-
- CURRENT MEETING REPORT
- Reported by Steve Casner, Allison Mankin and Claudio Topolcic
-
-
- ATTENDEES
-
-
- 1. Casner, Steve/casner@isi.edu
-
- 2. Clark, David/ddc@lcs.mit.edu
-
- 3. Fedor, Mark/fedor@nisc.nyser.net
-
- 4. Fox, Richard/rfox@suntan.tandem.com
-
- 5. Mankin, Allison/mankin@gateway.mitre.org
-
- 6. Mazraani, Tony/tonym@flora.wustl.edu
-
- 7. Park, Philippe/ppark@bbn.com
-
- 8. Parulkar, Guru/guru@flora.wustl.edu
-
- 9. Ramakrishnan, KK/rama@erlang.dec.com
-
- 10. Su, Zaw-Sing/zsu@sri.com
-
- 11. Toplocic, Claudio/topolcic@bbn.com
-
- 12. Wood, C. Philip/cpw@lanl.gov
-
- 13. Zhang, Lixia/lixia@lcs.mit.edu
-
-
- MINUTES
-
- The working group held three meetings. The meeting held during the day of
- Tuesday 25 July covered the high level and long term issues of connection
- oriented internet protocols. A second meeting was held on 26 July and
- covered a number of short term issues that need to be discussed to finalize
- the ST specification. Since all such issues hadn't been addressed, we held
- a third meeting during the morning of 27 July.
-
- Connection_oriented_internet_protocol_meeting_of_25_July_1989____
-
- Three presentations were made. Lixia Zhang described the Flow Protocol
- (FP). Guru Parulkar gave a high level description of McHIP and Tony Mazraani
-
- described the McHIP protocol in more detail. These interactive
- presentations took the bulk of the day. Their content is not described here
-
- because they are better described in other documents.
-
- The suggestion that the working group adopt McHIP as its protocol led to a
- discussion about the future of McHIP, ST and the working group. Adopting a
- specific protocol would provide direction and structure. It would help keep
- the working group from endless debating. It would cause us to look at
- practical tradeoffs, etc.
-
- If a protocol is to be selected, then what should it be? The three choices
- appear to be McHIP, FP, and ST-2. It is somewhat easier to consider the
- relation between McHIP and ST-2. It would be optimal for both to evolve to
- a single protocol. This is reasonable since they are very similar. A
- significant difference is that ST-2 uses simplex connections to support
- conferences and McHIP uses omniplex connections. Another issue is that ST-2
- is a very short term effort that will be operational in approximately six
- months, whereas McHIP is being developed in a somewhat longer schedule.
-
- McHIP is harder to compare with FP. They seem to be addressing different
- issues. Guru felt that FP is more a network protocol than an internet
- protocol because it does not fully address the use of pure connectionless
- networks. Claudio felt that McHIP addresses a number of protocol issues,
- while FP provides a resource management algorithm. Claudio felt that we
- could reasonably implement a version of McHIP that incorporates an FP style
- resource management scheme.
-
- Since time was running short, we decided to review our earlier ideas about
- the kinds of applications we wanted to support and the implications they
- have on the protocol. We decided to do this my E-mail. Phil will
- redistribute his messages entitled "Connection Oriented Protocol" and
- "Application Characterization" and Claudio will redistribute the minutes of
- the October 88 meeting. We will all read the first three sections of Guru's
- paper "The Next Generation of Internetworking". We will continue this
- discussion by E-mail. Phil and Guru will be in charge of writing a
- resulting paper.
-
- ST_protocol_specification_meeting_of_26_July_1989___
-
- We went over the decisions we had made at the previous meeting and made a
- number of new decisions.
-
- Reviewing the agreements from the evening meeting on ST at Cocoa Beach in
- April:
-
-
-
- 3
- o IP encapsulation: adopt Steve Casner's description.
-
- o Using IP-like headers: tabled for now; this can be retrofitted later.
- o Interface to next higher protocol: it is OK to make changes as long as
-
- there is a good reason for them.
-
- o We will need to write more documents than this one.
-
- o Control messages: it is OK to define new ones if they have different
- functions from the old ones.
-
- o ST.DG: eliminated.
-
- o Source route option: it can be an option in the connect message. For
- multipoint this might be too hard, but one could at least do
- incremental connections with a source route option on each.
-
- o Security: use SDNS.
-
-
-
- 4
- New decisions to be made:
-
-
- o Aggregation: we just get rid of it.
- o Routing: the routing protocol is separate, just as for IP.
-
- o Next protocol field: should this just be part of the Extension field
- (EXT= PROTOCOL & PORT)? But should ST carry only the IP address and
- protocol field, as does IP, and let the higher-level protocol carry the
- port number, as does TCP? This assumes that the "open" message of the
- higher-level protocol is carried in the ST connect message. Then, in
- multipoint the ST header must have a list of addresses and NVP must
- have a list of ports. We have not answered how the elements of these
- two lists are associated nor decided this issue yet.
-
- o Keep PTP, or have a flag for automatic establishment of a reverse
- connection? Really, there should be three flags:
-
- 1. "Don't assign a group address, I promise not to have more than 2
- parties in the connection."
-
- 2. "Do reverse HID assignment because there are only 2 parties now."
-
- 3. "Allocate bandwidth for the reverse path, i.e., automatically set
- up two connections at once. For multipoint, set up N-1 individual
- reverse connections." Would have to carry two flowspecs in the
- connect.
-
- An issue is that multiple connection names must be assigned. If the
- source does them all, then the connection name could wind up
- corresponding to (having the IP address of) a host that's no longer in
- the connection:
-
- Step 1. Host A opens a multipoint connection to hosts B and
- C with the reverse bit on. This creates
- connections named A1(A -> B,C), A2(B -> A), and A3
- (C -> A).
-
- Step 2. Host C incrementally adds to connection A3 a path
- to host D, so we have A3 that connects C->A,D.
-
- Step 3. Host A drops out, leaving A3 as a connection from C
- to D (but the connection name includes A).
-
- Is this a killer? "A detail for the RFC writer to work out."
-
- o HID negotiation: Claudio will write up a reasonable one from his
- proposals for review, and we will use the static assignment subset
- implementation in practice.
-
- o Robustness measures: We need more link-state information exchange to
-
-
-
- 5
- determine if ST connectivity is still established. That is, we must be
- able to tell if ST state was lost at the next agent. If there's a
-
- temporary net outage but no state loss, then just try a network repair
- (reallocate stream in WBnet). If a link goes down long enough to
- declare it dead, then back up hop by hop to do a pruned, depth-first
- search for alternate connection paths. The pruning is based on
- whatever routing information is available, so paths that are known to
- be insufficient are not tried. We will use Claudio's BREAK proposal
- for repairing the connection.
-
-
- ST_protocol_specification_meeting_of_27_July_1989___
-
- Continuing the previous day's discussion:
-
-
- Robustness-level timeouts to keep track of agents going down:
- Exchange of keepalive control packets is per ST agent pair, which
- means per IP address pair. This only goes on if there is a
- connection up. An implementation may choose not to timeout if
- data is flowing but keepalives don't come in (fall behind). May
- want to have a separate timeout for each connection that is
- determined by the application: the connection is not flushed
- immediately upon declaring the link down, but only when the
- timeout expires after that (timeout may be zero). Applications
- should/may have their own data-dependent timeout, and then
- disconnect on failure.
-