Subject: RE: IPv6 Flow Label Specification

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 15:46:45 +0300

Hi Brian,

> I agree. The basic spec should be lean and mean. Do you see 
> anywhere that we have over-defined things?

I just did a quick re-read of the the draft, and I think it looks
good.  I'll do a more thorough review of it, however.

Also, I have forwarded a request that people in the NSIS WG review
it to see if they have problems.  I will summarize the results.

thanks,
John

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2002 11:29:47 +0300

Hi Brian,

> Is it really the case that the application needs to be involved in
> choosing the flow label value?  Or is it more reasonable to say that
> the app needs to be able to indicate that it wants to use *a* flow
> label?

I could see cases where it might want to use a 'new' flow label, an
existing flow label, sharing a flow label with another application, etc.

> I can see the flow label management issue being more efficient in
> the IPv6 stack itself.

Well, in anycase, applications (upper layer protocols) may need to manage
flow labels as well.

One example would be if a user has an existing flow but wants to modify
the properties of the flow in some way (higher level of QoS or something).

> Of course, there is also an issue of whether two applications on
> the same machine communicating with the same peer machine would want
> to share a flow label.

Exactly.  I would suggest that we may not yet know how protocols above
IPv6 may want to use the flow label, so over specification of the
flow label by this community may not be the way to go.  Perhaps it
might be somewhat more useful to query TSVWG (for example) to see
if they have opinions on this. 

John