Internet DRAFT - draft-skelton-epri
draft-skelton-epri
Network Working Group Ron Skelton
Internet draft EPRI
Expire: September 1994 18 April 1994
Electric Power Research Institute Response to RFC 1550
<draft-skelton-ipng-epri-00.txt>
Status of this Memo
This document was submitted to the IETF IPng area in response to
RFC 1550 Publication of this document does not imply acceptance
by the IPng area of any ideas expressed within. Comments should
be submitted to the big-internet@munnari.oz.au mailing list.
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Executive Summary
The question of the future of the Internet protocol (IP) is an issue of
national if not international concern. It is critical to the building of
a National Information Infrastructure, comparable to the adoption of
basic standards for the industrial era such as railways, highways and
electricity.
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is a non-profit
organization, with 700 voluntary utility members, managing a technical
research and development program for the electric utility industry to
improve power production, distribution and use. The electric power
industry is a major user of computing and communications and is fully
committed to open systems.
While the industry is today a heavy user of the Internet Protocol Suite
(IPS) it is following a long term strategy based on international
standards developed by ISO and CCITT and national standards developed by
the IEEE, ANSI and other standards bodies that employ formal review and
voting procedures.
This strategy is based on a survey of needs in all aspects of the
electrical power supply enterprise. It concluded that these needs are
met more effectively by the current suite of OSI protocols and
international standards under development. Therefore, EPRI developed the
Utility Communications Architecture (UCA) specification for
communications and the Database Access Integrated Services specification
for data exchange both based on the OSI model and international
standards.
These specifications have been incorporated into the Industry Government
Open Systems Specification (IGOSS). They are receiving favorable
response and application by the industry and its suppliers as well as
the support of the natural gas and waterworks industries.
The issues facing the Internet community concerning growth and the
address and routing limitations of IP in particular, provide an ideal
opportunity for creating the national uniform information transport
superhighway. This is critical to the NII Agenda and the only proposal
that will achieve this goal is one that is acceptable from both private
and public sector viewpoints with both a national and an international
perspective.
EPRI also believes it is critically important that new requirements need
to be achieved by convergence of efforts to develop additional
standards. Security, directory services, network management, and the
ability to support real-time applications are four examples of where new
convergent standards efforts are required.
Just as society could not in the past accept multiple standards for the
gauge of the nation's railways, we can no longer accept multiple
standards for information transport.
Engineering Considerations
1. Mandatory Requirement.
Inter networking must evolve to provide an industrial strength computing
and communications environment for multiple uses of globally connected
network resources. Specifically the underlying transport must provide
high integrity support for upper layer industrial OSI applications
including but not limited to MMS and TP. Use of interface layers such
as RFC 1006 is not acceptable except as a transition strategy.
2. Basic Requirements.
- Scaleability
The addressing scheme must have essentially an unlimited address space
to encompass an arbitrarily large number of information objects.
Specifically it must solve the fundamental limitations of 32 bit
formats, a format for 20 octets and above is considered suitable.
- Routing table economy
Network addressing must achieve significant economy in routing database
size with very large networks.
- Support for the existing Internet
The existing internetworking paradigm and existing OSI and IPS
applications are to be supported.
3. Key Engineering Considerations- A pragmatic solution.
- Available now
The solution must be available now using mature, internationally agreed
standards and off-the-shelf implementations for hosts and routers. The
solution must leverage existing investments in standards development,
deployment and experience while at the same time provide for all basic
requirements.
- Ease of Transition
Any solution must provide an evolutionary transition path using an OSI
- IP dual network layer strategy. This must be achievable without
modifications to existing inter-domain routing protocols while
providing the ability to support proprietary protocols such as IPX and
Appletalk. The scheme must provide the ability to encompass other
addressing schemes such as X.121 and E .164. Existing SNMP and CMIP
MIBs must be applicable and available. Internet domain names need to be
retained.
- Routing effectiveness
This key objective requires features such as route aggregation, service
selection, and low frequency host advertisements; host routing
intelligence should not be required.
- Flexible Efficient Administration
Operational needs will need to be met in an economic and flexible
manner. Addressing allocations can be either geographically based or
based on carrier ID or both and will be administered by policy not
network topology. Simplified and robust configurability is required
which includes the ability to identify resources e.g. multi-homed hosts
and applications, instead of interfaces.
- Mobility
Dynamic addressing is required where hosts have the ability to learn
their own network address with the minimum of human intervention.
Author's Address
Ron Skelton
EPRI
RSKELTON@msm.epri.com
