On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 03:17:54AM +0100, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> > The draft currently assumes IS-IS or Babel would/could be the multicast
> > routing protocol.
> 
> This is what I wrote in Section 11.3:
> 
>    Some experts believe that it may be better to run a dedicated
>    multicast routing protocol rather than extensions to a unicast
>    routing protocol.
> 
> Sorry for the tone of the above, but since the IS-IS supporters are so
> keen on pointing out IS-IS's support for multicast, I didn't want to make
> it any more explicit.

I fully agree as far as anything that looks even remotely like MOSPF is
concerned.  Caveat:  I have no opinion on anything related to BIER or
other recent approaches to handling multicast.  They're different
beasts.

[quote shortened]
> > Hence, with IS-IS, I would put into use a separate multicast routing
> > topology (topology ID #4 is reserved for this.)  Routers would use the
> > knowledge of their interfaces and link status to come up with a pair of
> > unicast and multicast metrics, instead of just one metric.
> >
> > Babel does not - correct me if I'm wrong - have the capability to work
> > with more than one topology.
> 
> Babel does have the ability to work with multiple metrics.  All Babel
> announcements carry the default Babel metric, which is a 16-bit integer,
> and which is used by routers that don't understand the non-default
> metrics.  A Babel router may optionally include a non-default metric in
> a sub-TLV.  The radio diversity extension uses this ability to carry
> detailed information used for predicting interference.
> 
> [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chroboczek-babel-diversity-routing-00
> 
> No matter which metric they use for route selection, all routers use the
> default metric for loop-avoidance.  This means that Babel remains
> loop-free even in a heterogeneous network containing routers using the
> default and non-default metrics.
> 
> This is not full multi-topology support, and the limitation is that the
> non-default topology, taken as an unlabelled graph, must be a subset of
> the default topology: in other words, you cannot assign a finite
> non-default metric to a link that has an infinite default metric.  Of
> course, the default metric can be arbitrarily large -- just not infinite.
> 
> To be fair, no multicast metric sub-TLV is currently defined for Babel,
> and I will not do any work on defining one unless somebody shows me hard
> experimental data that proves that there exist realistic topologies where
> such an extension would be worth the hassle.  Since the currently
> available implementations of IS-IS have extremely primitive metric
> support, even in the unicast case (Section 7 of the comparison document),
> I don't think an honest person could possibly claim this is a disadvantage
> of Babel.

I stand corrected - that does indeed sound like there is rough parity
between Babel and IS-IS on the ability to transport separate metrics, in
case the WG comes to the opinion that this is useful.

For the comparison document, this thread is what I would expect to see
for section 11, looking at "backing" for multicast routing instead of
multicast routing itself.
*If* there really is an argument for IS-IS as multicast routing
protocol, it really needs to be more informative (and reference an
actual implementation, I guess) than 11.1 in the -02 comparison draft.

Cheers,


-David

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