Comment on Recovery Effort

[Ben Mack-Crane <Ben.Mack-Crane@tellabs.com>]

Hello,

This is a comment that I was unable to make in the WG meeting yesterday
due to time constraints:

The CCAMP recovery work includes contributions that are aimed at 
developing a common terminology for the recovery work.  A good amount of
effort has already gone into a similar effort in MPLS to produce
the draft-ietf-mpls-recovery-framework document, which I think
is progressing toward informational RFC.

It would be a very good idea if CCAMP would build on this work rather
than starting over and defining new terms for the same concepts covered
in that document.  There are certainly some concepts that apply only
to statistical networks; however, many of the concepts, terms and definitions,
either apply directly to other technologies (e.g., TDM, optical) or
could be relatively easily adjusted to do so.

There is also an existing body of work covering recovery mechanisms (particularly
protection switching) in the ITU standards (as pointed out by Maarten).  
The terminology is probably not completely consistent between the ITU and IETF, 
and perhaps this can be remedied somewhat as well.

In any case, starting a new effort to define common terminology is
not a good idea.  We should build on what is already there.

Regards,
Ben