RE: New I-D on inter-area (and inter-as) MPLS TE requirements

["Ash, Gerald R (Jerry), ALABS" <gash@att.com>]

Jim,

> This was written in about an hour, late the night before the 
> deadline (so show some mercy :)
> draft-boyle-tewg-interarea-reqts-00.txt

It's pretty good for an hour's worth :-)

> The goal was to make sure that we cover requirements for 
> inter-area TE.  To show that it's not that hard to couple in 
> the requirements for inter-as TE, I extended it to cover that 
> as well.

General comments:
I'm glad you're providing inter-area TE requirements.  I agree that both inter-area TE and inter-AS TE should be progressed together, and would not favor progressing inter-AS TE without also progressing inter-area TE.  It would seem if a SP needed inter-AS TE, they would usually also need inter-area TE.  A while back vendors claimed that many SPs were requesting inter-area TE.  I assume that's still the case, else can someone explain why SPs would want inter-AS TE and not inter-area TE?

Specific comments:
1. Some of the functionality's in Section 1.1 should be more specific, e.g.,
- what bandwidth specification: Tspec parameters? overbooking considerations?  'reserved bandwidth' as per DSTE?
- what priorities: setup priority? holding priority? preemption priority as per DSTE?
2. Section 3.1: 
"when the source is more than one area away from the destination, the destination's border router may send back a Path Error.  Ideally, the source's border router would try another border router into the destination's area, however with current protocol, the Path Error will propagate to the source."
sounds like a requirement for [crankback] functionality http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iwata-mpls-crankback-06.txt
3. Section 3.4:
" Diffserv TE should be directly translatable at border-routers, as the class-type of an LSP is explicit for class-types greater than 0 and not-existent in the path message for class-type 0."
Are you proposing to standardize class-type 0 to mean best effort?  Section 1.4 also refers to 'conventions' for class-types 0, 1, and 2.

Regards,
Jerry

~ an hour's worth of commenting :-)