The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Requirements for Advanced Multipath in MPLS Networks' (draft-ietf-rtgwg-cl-requirement-16.txt) as Informational RFC This document is the product of the Routing Area Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Stewart Bryant and Adrian Farrel. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-rtgwg-cl-requirement/ Technical Summary There is often a need to provide large aggregates of bandwidth that are best provided using parallel links between routers or MPLS LSP. In core networks there is often no alternative since the aggregate capacities of core networks today far exceed the capacity of a single physical link or single packet processing element. The presence of parallel links, with each link potentially comprised of multiple layers has resulted in additional requirements. Certain services may benefit from being restricted to a subset of the component links or a specific component link, where component link characteristics, such as latency, differ. Certain services require that an LSP be treated as atomic and avoid reordering. Other services will continue to require only that reordering not occur within a microflow as is current practice. Working Group Summary Interest in the draft was mild - focus mostly from a small set of participants and the co-authors. There were no contentious points. There was discussion about the value of DR#6 where the overhead of just signaling the composite link members may be better than dealing with crankback or poor summarization. The work can support both approaches. After the last WGLC completed, there was concern about the terminology of composite link not quite matching that used in the ITU. The draft has been updated to use the term "Advanced Multipath" instead. Some additional simplifications were also made by the authors' agreement. During IETF Last Call there was a significant discussion between the Routing Directorate reviewer and the Editor which led to further updates to the text. Document Quality The document is well written and has been updated with focus several times. It has benefited from having Curtis Villamizar being a focused and motivated editor for this and the related drafts. There are no existing implementations, as makes sense for a requirements draft. Personnel Document Shepherd: Alia Atlas Responsible AD: Stewart Bryant
