[Nsi-wg] Thoughts on a basic topology model for NSI

[Jerry Sobieski]

Hi all-

Relative to our brief discussion last week about topology and the NSI...

We want the NSI to offer more power and options to the "user" - to break 
out of the traditional carrier models for interacting with the user.   
And I think our notions of Requesting aAgents and Providing Agents does 
that nicely and in a very elegant and scalable fashion.

However, we still have a lot of discussion about pathfinding - about how 
the agents will go about decomposing a path request into sub-paths for 
tree or chain model processing, or how we decide which NRMs are 
responsible for a particular end point, etc.  These all deal with 
*topology*.   There are quite a few notions we take for granted that 
require some sort of topology model.  For instance:  a Service 
Termination Point.  Whatever we end up caling it, the semantics of an 
STP is that it represents a point in the topology where a service 
connection can terminate.  We talk about capturing path information for 
monitoring...that requires a notion of how the topology is defined.   
There are lots of topologically based assumptions we need to be more 
explicit about.

So this set of slides tries to capture some thoughts of mine on how we 
can pose a simple minimalist topological model sufficient for our NSI 
purposes.   I think it is consistent wth our thoughts and discussions.  
And while it may bump into things that the NML WG is considering, I 
doubt a) we have come up with anything conflicting, and b) we certanly 
have not gone to the details of how to describe or distribute a topology 
database - we just assume we have a TopoDB and that is contains these 
basic constructs.

Comments are welcome...Its only a draft for consideration...
Jerry

While the NSI protocol itself does not impose a particular topology on 
the transport plane or the agents that manage it, we do impose some 
notions on the Connections we construct - e.g. that the NSAs will, as a 
group, be able to construct and reserve a suitable path for the request.
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