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-
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- CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
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-
- Reported by Claudio Topolcic/BBN
-
- MINUTES
-
- The CO-IP Working Group met at the February 6-9 IETF Meeting at Florida
- State University. The Tuesday sessions were a presentation and
- discussion on ATM networks by Guru Parulkar of Washington University.
- The Wednesday morning session was a discussion of the issues, questions,
- and experiments raised by a guaranteed service network. The Wednesday
- afternoon session was canceled so that the working group members could
- attend the SMDS working group meeting. Work on the ST-2 protocols
- specification was dropped due to insufficient time.
-
- The ATM presentation consisted of roughly three parts: a BISDN
- perspective, ATM networks, and SMDS. The Broadband Integrated Services
- Digital Network is intended to support voice and video, DS1/3, X.25, and
- Switched Multi-megabit Data Services, with the latter including
- connectionless 802.6. The video services would include
- broadcast/permanent connections (e.g., cable TV), point-to-point
- connections, and switched connections, including conferencing. Video
- rates include both NTSC (45 Mbit) and ATV (135 Mbit). It is predicted
- that after 1995 it will be cheaper to run fiber to a home than to run
- copper. The protocol stack consists of application supported by an
- adaptation layer (which would include segmentation and reassembly if
- required) over the ATM layer over a SONET physical layer. SONET STS-3c
- consists of a 155.520 Mbit channel divided into 125 microsecond frames,
- with each frame containing 90 bytes of overhead and nine "channels" of
- 260 bytes each (the channels are not all byte aligned).
-
- An ATM frame consists of a 5-byte header followed by 48 bytes of data.
- The header format isn't yet standardized, but would most likely consist
- of 28 bits of combined Virtual Path Identifier (VPI) and Virtual Channel
- Identifier (VCI), an 8-bit checksum, a 2-bit priority field, and a 2-bit
- type field. A Virtual Path may inlude a number of Virtual Channels
- switched as a unit, so either the VPI or the VCI is used for cell
- forwarding on a hop-by-hop basis. The boundary between the VPI and VCI
- might vary at different interfaces. The VPI/VCI field might include
- other logical subfields, e.g., flow control information, etc.
-
- The Adaptation layer consists of a convergence sublayer on top of a
- segmentation and reassembly sublayer. The convergence sublayer wraps
- the padded application data with a header and trailer; the segmentation
- and reassembly sublayer segments the wrapped application data and adds
- its own header and trailer before passing each segment to the ATM layer.
-
- The services provided by ATM include point-to-point, multicast, and
- dynamic multicast callees, a QOS (which would probably be a fixed delay
- and loss specification within a homogeneous network), naked (aka dark)
- cells which will not be reordered by the network, and a bandwidth
- requirement specification. Bandwidth would be specified in terms of
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- mean, peak, and burst characteristics, with the actual nature of the
- latter still unspecified. Bandwidth consumption would be limited to
- that requested.
-
- With respect to CO-IP, there are two basic assumptions: the Internet
- will be heterogeneous for some time, and that LANs will not be ATM
- networks in the forseeable future. The conclusions were: since
- applications may generate packets larger than cell size, transparent
- fragmentation and reassembly should be supperted, CO-IP parameters
- should be consistent with ATM (at least in the voice context where the
- packet size is small) and CO-IP should try to be consistent with ATM
- naked cells (to minimize as much as possible the adaptation layer), the
- working group should make concrete plans for CO-IP experiments across
- ATM based high-speed networks, and to identify work that has/is being
- done in the ATM community for use in the CO-IP subnet dependent layer.
-
- Wednesday morning's session consisted of a discussion of CO-IP issues,
- questions, services and parameters. Included were: adherence to a
- schedule, blocking and delay, chokepoints, effect of linear topology
- problems and multi-hop paths, enforcement to meet performance
- requirements, fairness, reuse of unclaimed reserved bandwidth, combining
- best-effort and resource-reservation algorithms, throughput, and traffic
- characterizations. The latter were described as duration relative to
- RTT (i.e., << 2 RTT, 2 RTT, and >> 2 RTT), flowrate (steady,
- compressed steady, bursty), and predictability (none, e.g., interactive,
- ASAP, e.g., mail, and scheduled, e.g., a conference).
-
- A subset of the working group met Wednesday and Thursday evenings to
- discuss the practical details of future research collaboration. We
- agreed that such cooperation was possible, and would result in increased
- results with an overall decrease in effort. Since most participants
- felt most comfortable working with UNIX, we decided to adopt it as the
- experimental platform. We agreed to implement a basic protocol
- infrastructure in the UNIX-based DRI experimental gateway for
- experiments across the DRI testbed. MCHIP, ST-2, or other experimental
- protocols will be built on top of this infrastructure, and this would
- support experimentation and changes to the protocols. It will be
- possible to replace the modules that implement different functions, such
- as resource management or failure detection, relatively easily. By
- experimenting with them, we will gain practical experience in how
- different algorithms perform in various situations. These initial
- implementations will evolve to a single better protocol as we
- incorporate the better approaches. We are initially planning to
- implement a MCHIP gateway and host, and an ST-2 gateway and voice and
- video hosts.
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-
- ATTENDEES
-
- Brim, Scott swb@devvax.tn.cornell.edu
- Casner, Steve casner@isi.edu
- Chatterjee, Samir samir@nynexst.com
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- Clapp, George meritec!clapp@bellcore.bellcore.com
- Easterday, Tom tom@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu
- Fidler, Mike ts0026@ohstvma.ircc.ohio-state.edu
- Fox, Richard sytek!rfox@sun.com
- Gerich, Elise epg@merit.edu
- Goldstein, Steve goldstein@note.nsf.gov
- Lynn, Charles clynn@bbn.com
- McKenney, Paul E. mckenney@sri.com
- Medin, Milo medin@nsipo.nasa.gov
- Parulkar, Guru guru@flora.wustl.edu
- Piscitello, David dave@sabre.bellcore.com
- Ramakrishnan, K.K. rama%erlang.dec.com@decwrl.dec.com
- Su, Zaw-Sing zsu@tsca.istc.sri.com
- Topolcic, Claudio topolcic@bbn.com
- Wilder, Rick rick@gateway.mitre.org
- Yavatkar, Raj raj@ms.uky.edu
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