The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Requirements for MPLS-TP Shared Mesh Protection' (draft-ietf-mpls-smp-requirements-09.txt) as Informational RFC This document is the product of the Multiprotocol Label Switching Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Adrian Farrel and Alia Atlas. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mpls-smp-requirements/ Technical Summary This document presents the basic network objectives for the behavior of shared mesh protection (SMP) which are not based on control plane support. This is an expansion of the basic requirements presented in RFC 5654 "Requirements for the Transport Profile of MPLS" and RFC 6372 "MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) Survivability Framework". This document provides requirements for any mechanism that would be used to implement SMP for MPLS-TP data paths, in networks that delegate protection switch coordination to the data plane. Working Group Summary The work on MPLS-TP SMP started with a number of solution drafts, some which were fairly quickly merged, but the WG failed to reach consensus to merge all solutions into a single document. The advice from the working group chairs at this point was to start with a requirement specification. The current document is the result of that process and includes authors from across the solutions drafts. The document has been well discussed in the part of the MPLS WG that is interested in MPLS-TP style protection. The only "out of the ordinary" thing that has happened is that at one point in time some of the authors told me that "the document is ready for wglc". In preparation for the wglc the shepherd started an IPR poll saying: "The authors of draft-ietf-mpls-smp-requirements have told the working group chairs that the draft is ready to be working group last called. Before starting the the wglc we need to do an IPR poll." Resulting in that one author and one contributor notified the shepherd that they did not believe the document was ready to go! Well - this was sorted out and all comments addressed. Document Quality This document is a requirement specification, and as such is not possible to implement. It has been claimed in the discussion that led up to merging solutions documents and requirement that some of the existing MPLS-TP protection implementations fulfil the requirements in this draft. The documented benefitted from an experimental English language review in the MPLS WG. Personnel Loa Andersson is the Document Shepherd. Adrian Farrel is the Responsible AD