Subject: [Anima] Two questions to the WG from the Signaling Design Team

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2015 16:12:03 +1200

Hi,

The signaling design team has been working on requirements and issues
for the Anima signaling protocol, and we have a couple of questions for
the WG as a whole. Our goal is to produce a draft for WG discussion and
possible adoption in July. Our part of the wiki is at
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/anima/trac/wiki/Signaling .

Question 1: The current draft design uses a traditional binary TLV protocol
(similar to the Homenet DNCP design). Extensions, including the design
of the objective(s) for each new autonomic use case, will require careful
low-level design and possibly IANA registration.

If we want Anima to be an ongoing success, it needs to be convenient for the
designers of Autonomic Service Agents to define new objectives and for programmers
to express them in code, without being protocol design experts. A binary TLV
design is not good from that point of view.

It's been proposed to the design team that we should explore a more programmer-
friendly approach. The main candidate is to represent the protocol elements in JSON,
with a suitable serialization such as CBOR for actual message transmission, to
avoid excessive impact on run-time efficiency and footprint.

So the question to the working group is: would you prefer to see the design team
pursue a JSON solution, or to stick with the current binary TLV approach?

Question 2: This is a cosmetic question. The current protocol model assumes that
autonomic operations will be either negotiation or synchronization between
peers. As time goes on, we might want to extend this model. So should we
change the protocol name from GDNP (generic discovery and negotiation) to
GRASP (GeneRic Autonomic Signaling Protocol)?

Regards
    Brian Carpenter (Anima Signaling DT editor)

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2015 10:28:58 -0400

Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > If we want Anima to be an ongoing success, it needs to be convenient
    > for the designers of Autonomic Service Agents to define new objectives
    > and for programmers to express them in code, without being protocol
    > design experts.

I wish to clarify your words:
  "protocol design expert" == someone who can write IETF draft, or
                           navigate IANA / Expert Review process.

    > Question 2: This is a cosmetic question. The current protocol model
    > assumes that autonomic operations will be either negotiation or
    > synchronization between peers. As time goes on, we might want to extend
    > this model. So should we change the protocol name from GDNP (generic
    > discovery and negotiation) to GRASP (GeneRic Autonomic Signaling
    > Protocol)?

I like GRASP as a name, I don't know if I like the expanstion.
I find GDNP a mouthful and hard to type (GNDP...)

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Jun 2015 08:45:02 +1200

>                            navigate IANA / Expert Review process.

There's that, and there is also quite simply (and no insult intended) a
recent CS graduate who's been hired to work on an ASA product and has been
brought up on object-oriented languages and simply isn't familiar with
bit-oriented protocol design.

> I find GDNP a mouthful and hard to type (GNDP...)

The name is more important the expansion, perhaps ;-)

   Brian

---

From: Sheng Jiang <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 06:02:05 +0000

>I find GDNP a mouthful and hard to type (GNDP...)

I like GRASP as well, with different reason: it does not mean the functions only have discovery and negotiation. Since we are discussing to add more signaling functions, like synchronization, GRASP may be more proper.

Sheng