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