Subject: [pm-dir] draft-ietf-alto-protocol metareview

From: Brian Trammell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2013 13:17:09 +0200

Greetings, all,

As the assigned/volunteered pm-dir reviewer for draft-ietf-alto-protocol, I've quickly reviewed the document, and found that it does not define any performance metrics which should be subject to review: the mention of performance metrics in the draft is a note that ALTO-based traffic optimization could be used as an input to metric-based traffic optimization processes, in order to guide active measurements and make them more efficient (section 1.2.2).

ALTO uses a "cost metric" for traffic optimization, with a single metric provided by the base protocol: "routingcost" (Section 6.1.1.1). The exact mapping of this to any real-world value is explicitly declared out of scope: "This Cost Metric conveys a generic measure for the cost of routing traffic from a source to a destination.  Lower values indicate a higher preference for traffic to be sent from a source to a destination. Note that an ISP may internally compute routing cost using any method it chooses (e.g., air-miles or hop-count) as long as it conforms to these semantics."

Performance metrics (i.e.., of the ALTO protocol itself) are explicitly out of scope for the document (15.2.5.)

IMO pm-dir need not take any further action for this document.

Best regards,

Brian