eap Mailing List: Issue 376: Overall Comments on draft-ietf-eap-netsel-problem-04.txt

[Bernard Aboba (bernard_aboba]

Issue 376: Overall Comments
Submitter name: Bernard Aboba
Submitter email address: aboba [at] internaut.com
Date Submitted: August 8, 2006
Reference:
Document: NETSEL-04
Comment type: Editorial
Priority: S
Section: Various
Rationale/Explanation of issue:

Organizational Issues

This document has some organizational issues.   Section 1 describes when
the realm selection problem becomes relevant but since the problem is
defined in Section 2, the reader is left without an understanding of how
the problem manifests itself in those situations.  To provide some
context, I think that some text is needed in Section 1 for each of the
first two bullets, describing the issues that can occur.  The third bullet
does include discussion of issues.

In order to parallel the problems listed in Section 2, I was expecting a
section on "Payload routing" as well as one on "realm capability
discovery".  Instead, I found found Sections 2.4 and 2.5 which do not seem
to correspond to one of the listed problems.  I think Section 2.5 does
relate to the "capability discovery" problem so that perhaps it should be
renamed.  I am not clear why Section 2.4 belongs where it is; I'd suggest
it be moved out of Section 2.

Section 2.3.1 seems to end just as it got started.  This section seems to
be going somewhere important so I think it needs to be fleshed out.  For
example, it could talk about how "default" versus "default free" proxies
in AAA routing.

Section 3 interrupts the flow of the document, and so I think it might be
best moved to an Appendix.

Section 4 is actually quite important, since one of the goals of this
effort was to address architectural problems with existing solutions.
However, this section does not talk much about scalability issues.

Terminology

The abstract refers to the "realm discovery and selection problem", as
do sections 1 and 2. However, the title of the document is still "Network
Discovery and Selection Problem".  Also Section 3 uses other terms such as
"access network discovery", "network discovery process", "network
selection", without defining them.  If you are going to use these terms
later on, I think that either new definitions are needed in Section 1.1,
or the terminology should be harmonized with the existing definitions.
Currently the terms "Access Technology Selection" and "Bearer Selection"
do not appear to be referenced outside Section 1.1.

References

Two reference styles are used.  Most of the time the straight number style
is used (e.g. [34]).  However, in Section 3.3, the author name is also
given (e.g. "Ahmavaara, Haverinen and Pichna [34]").  I would suggest
using a consistent style.  Personally, I am not very fond of the number
style of referencing, particularly when RFCs are being referenced.