Network Working Group R. Skelton
Request for Comments: 1673 EPRI
Category: Informational August 1994

Electric Power Research Institute Comments on IPng

Status of this Memo

This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

This document was submitted to the IETF IPng area in response to RFC
1550. Publication of this document does not imply acceptance by the
IPng area of any ideas eXPressed within. Comments should be
submitted to the big-internet@munnari.oz.au mailing list.

Executive Summary

The question of the future of the Internet protocol (IP) is an issue
of national if not international concern. It is critical to the
building of a National Information InfrastrUCture, comparable to the
adoption of basic standards for the industrial era such as railways,
highways and electricity.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is a non-profit
organization, with 700 voluntary utility members, managing a
technical research and development program for the electric utility
industry to improve power production, distribution and use. The
electric power industry is a major user of computing and
communications and is fully committed to open systems.

While the industry is today a heavy user of the Internet Protocol
Suite (IPS) it is following a long term strategy based on
international standards developed by ISO and CCITT and national
standards developed by the IEEE, ANSI and other standards bodies that
employ formal review and voting procedures.

This strategy is based on a survey of needs in all ASPects of the
electrical power supply enterprise. It concluded that these needs
are met more effectively by the current suite of OSI protocols and
international standards under development. Therefore, EPRI developed
the Utility Communications Architecture (UCA) specification for
communications and the Database Access Integrated Services
specification for data exchange both based on the OSI model and

international standards.

These specifications have been incorporated into the Industry
Government Open Systems Specification (IGOSS). They are receiving
favorable response and application by the industry and its suppliers
as well as the support of the natural gas and waterworks industries.

The issues facing the Internet community concerning growth and the
address and routing limitations of IP in particular, provide an ideal
opportunity for creating the national uniform information transport
superhighway. This is critical to the NII Agenda and the only
proposal that will achieve this goal is one that is acceptable from
both private and public sector viewpoints with both a national and an
international perspective.

EPRI also believes it is critically important that new requirements
need to be achieved by convergence of efforts to develop additional
standards. Security, Directory services, network management, and the
ability to support real-time applications are four examples of where
new convergent standards efforts are required.

Just as society could not in the past accept multiple standards for
the gauge of the nation's railways, we can no longer accept multiple
standards for information transport.

Engineering Considerations

1. Mandatory Requirement.

Inter networking must evolve to provide an industrial strength
computing and communications environment for multiple uses of
globally connected network resources. Specifically the underlying
transport must provide high integrity support for upper layer
industrial OSI applications including but not limited to MMS and
TP. Use of interface layers such as RFC1006 is not acceptable
except as a transition strategy.

2. Basic Requirements.

- Scaleability
The addressing scheme must have essentially an unlimited address
space to encompass an arbitrarily large number of information
objects. Specifically it must solve the fundamental limitations
of 32 bit formats, a format for 20 octets and above is considered
suitable.

- Routing table economy
Network addressing must achieve significant economy in routing
database size with very large networks.

- Support for the existing Internet
The existing internetworking paradigm and existing OSI and IPS
applications are to be supported.

3. Key Engineering Considerations - A pragmatic solution.

- Available now
The solution must be available now using mature, internationally
agreed standards and off-the-shelf implementations for hosts and
routers. The solution must leverage existing investments in
standards development, deployment and experience while at the
same time provide for all basic requirements.

- Ease of Transition
Any solution must provide an evolutionary transition path using
an OSI.

- IP dual network layer strategy.
This must be achievable without modifications to existing
inter-domain routing protocols while providing the ability to
support proprietary protocols such as IPX and Appletalk. The
scheme must provide the ability to encompass other addressing
schemes such as X.121 and E.164. Existing SNMP and CMIP MIBs
must be applicable and available. Internet domain names need
to be retained.

- Routing effectiveness
This key objective requires features such as route aggregation,
service selection, and low frequency host advertisements; host
routing intelligence should not be required.

- Flexible Efficient Administration
Operational needs will need to be met in an economic and
flexible manner. Addressing allocations can be either
geographically based or based on carrier ID or both and will be
administered by policy not network topology. Simplified and
robust configurability is required which includes the ability to
identify resources e.g., multi-homed hosts and applications,
instead of interfaces.

- Mobility
Dynamic addressing is required where hosts have the ability to
learn their own network address with the minimum of human
intervention.

Security Considerations

Security isses are not discussed in this memo.

Author's Address

Ron Skelton
Member of Technical Staff
Advanced IT Group
Electric Power Research Institute
Palo Alto CA 94303

EMail: RSKELTON@msm.epri.com