Re: Requirements for IP Multihoming Architectures

[Vijay Gill <vijay@umbc.edu>]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Margaret Wasserman wrote:

> I also have some questions on the requirements draft, included below.
>
>       3.2 Load Sharing
>
>          Load sharing is distributing traffic across multiple
>       links. Reasons
>          for load sharing include but are not limited to:
>
>          o  Performance,
>
>          o  Cost, and
>
>          o  Availability of Infrastructure.
>
>
> What are the actual requirements in this area?  Do we require that all
> site multihoming solutions support load sharing, as described?  What
> types of load sharing decisions do we need to support?
>
> From discussion on the list, there seems to be come consensus that
> customers expect load sharing when they purchase connectivity from
> more than one site.  But, are the mechanisms to provide that load
> sharing something that this WG will discuss/develop/promote?

[rest of excellent commentary snipped ]

Things to note:

 1) this is a strawman document to stimulate discussion

 2) this document describes what is being done today. These are
    the sort of things that customers have demanded, are continuing
    to demand and unless something fundamental changes in ip service
    reliability, the customers will continue to demand.


I think and I can be wrong here, that any solution that is proposed to
address multihoming should be able to solve for these, else it _will_ be
an interesting ivory tower design that never sees real world use.

The question of what exactly it is we are solving for (see ohta-san's
comments earlier) is open for discussion, what we have documented is the
first cut of solutions that may be addressing fundamentally deeper issues,
but that is all we have to go on right now.

thanks

/vijay