Reliable transport vs. reliable transport

One of the most contradictory uses of terminology in communications concerns the word transport as used by the IETF and the ITU-T communities. To make matters worse, the term’s prevalent modifier reliable leads to even further divergence in meaning.To the Internet community, transport refers to the fourth layer of the OSI layer stack (a layer stack known to the ITU-T as X.200, but largely assumed

IETF79 - Beijing !

I haven’t had much time to blog of late, having to catch up on work since returning from Beijing.Beijing ? I hear you ask. Yes, the 79th IETF meeting was held 7-12 November in the Chinese capital.This was my 26’th IETF, and things have changed since my first meeting. Back in the “old days” the meetings were mostly in the US (e.g., Minneapolis in the winter) and occasionally in Europe. This was

OAM for flows

Continuing my coverage of the recent joint IESG/IAB design team on OAM, this time I want to discuss the issue of OAM for flows in Packet Switched Networks (PSNs).From a pure topology standpoint any communications network is imply a set of source ports (i.e., interfaces into which we may input information), a set of destination ports (i.e., interfaces from which we may receive information), and a

IETF and OAM

On October 12nd and 13th the IESG (Internet Engineering Steering Group) and IAB (Internet Architecture Board), the two IETF management bodies, held a joint design session on OAM. I was a bit surprised that the IETF leadership would be interested in devoting a separate meeting (not coinciding with an IETF conference) to the subject of OAM; OAM has never been an area of IETF expertise. Indeed, when

Skepticon Selling Out

Just a quick heads up: Skepticon 3 is on the verge of selling out. Only a few hundred seats left (out of some 1500 or so). So if you want in, now's the time...

OAM for FM and PM

The Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM) functionality provided in all modern communications systems supports two distinguishable functions, namely Fault Management (FM) and Performance Management (PM).It is important to remember that despite the use of the word “management” here, OAM is a user-plane function. OAM may trigger control plane procedures (e.g., protection switching) or

At CSH Conference

I will be on a panel at the Council for Secular Humanism's 30th Anniversary Conference in Los Angeles (California), which is taking place October 7th-10th (2010). Unfortunately this event was way more amazing than I knew, so it's already sold out. So this notice won't be of any use to anyone--except those already lucky enough to be going. But I will be joining several other speakers on a joint