The MPLS WG Archive

[James Carlson <james.d.carlson@east.sun.com>]

Alex Zinin writes:
>  I'm talking mostly about the second part.
> 
>  The question such a document (BCP or whatever status) could
>  address is "how does one send IP over a SONET DCC channel?".
>  The answer could be as simple as "by using RFC1662 encapsulation
>  and treating D{1-3}/D{4-12} OH bytes as a synchronous stream
>  of octets", i.e., not by using LAP-D, or LAP-B, or SLIP, and
>  not trying to align HDLC frames within the sequence of SONET
>  frames.

Note that there are no IETF documents covering, for instance, how to
carry PPP over T1 lines.  I don't consider that to be a gap that
necessarily needs to be filled.  Similarly, I think the treatment of
D1-D3 as one bit-oriented synchronous data stream (Section DCC) and
D4-D12 as another (Line DCC) is a rather obvious usage of those SONET
features that doesn't need a separate draft for interoperable use.

I don't think SLIP is a serious suggestion (is it?), since it has no
error control or protection against address misconfiguration.
LAP-D/B/F variants are possible, but similarly somewhat outside the
control of the IETF.

That's why I suggested a BCP instead.  I don't see it as a standards
issue but rather a usage issue.

(If some implementations concatenate D1-D12 together, then I suppose
that could be a problem, and would need standards language, but,
again, probably not from the IETF.)

-- 
James Carlson, Internet Engineering       <james.d.carlson@east.sun.com>
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