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Re: [eap] EAP WG Last Call on Network Discovery and Selection Problem Document



Hi Bernard,

(cc'ing to 802.21 mailing list)

I've read draft-ietf-eap-netsel-problem-06.txt.  The draft looks good
for being published as an Informational RFC.  I have only minor
comments.  Please see below.

YO: The following four drafts have been expired.

   [I-D.arkko-eap-service-identity-auth], [I-D.groeting-eap-netselection-results]
   [I-D.josefsson-pppext-eap-tls-eap], [I-D.marques-ddp]

YO: The following reference should be updated to refer to 802.1X 2004
edition.

   [IEEE.8021X]
              Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, "Local
              and Metropolitan Area Networks: Port-Based Network Access
              Control", IEEE Standard 802.1X, September 2001.

YO: The following TGu document may be replaced with the latest TGu
draft, which is Draft P802.11u_D0.03.

   [11-05-0822-03-000u-tgu-requirements]
              Moreton, M., "TGu Requirements", IEEE Contribution 11-05-
              0822-03-000u-tgu-requirements, August 2005.

YO: The following reference should be updated to refer to 802.21 D04.00

   [IEEE.802.21]
              Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, "Draft
              IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks:
              Media Independent Handover Services", IEEE IEEE 802.21,
              D03.00, December 2006.

A.2.  IEEE 802

   o  IEEE 802.11u is working on realm discovery and network selection
      [11-05-0822-03-000u-tgu-requirements].  This includes a mechanism
      for enabling a station to determine the identities it can use to
      authenticate to an access network, prior to associating with that
      network.  As noted earlier, solving this problem requires the AP
      to maintain an up to date "default free" realm routing table,
      which is not feasible without dynamic routing support within the
      AAA infrastructure.  Similarly, apriori discovery of features
      supported within home realms (such as enrollment) is also
      difficult to implement in a scalable way, absent support for
      dynamic routing. 

YO: I am not sure whether the above text still applies to the latest
TGu draft P802.11u_D0.03 which defines a mechanism named GAS (Generic
Advertisement Service) to carry 802.21 Information Service messages.

                       Determination of network capabilities (such as
      QoS support) is considerably simpler, since these depend solely on
      the hardware and software contained within the AP.

   o  IEEE 802.21 [IEEE.802.21] is developing standards to enable
      handover between heterogeneous link layers, including both IEEE
      802 and non-IEEE 802 networks.  To enable this, a general
      mechanism for capability advertisement is being developed, which
      could conceivably benefit aspects of the network selection
      problem, such as realm discovery.  For example, IEEE 802.21 is
      developing Information Elements (IEs) which may assist with
      network selection, including information relevant to both layer 2
      and layer 3.  Query mechanisms (including both XML and TLV
      support) are also under development.

YO: It should be noted that the point of use of query mechanisms is
that query-based network discovery can reduce the amount of
information exchanged for network discovery by filtering out
unnecessary information.  Also, it might be worth mentioning that
802.21 also defines an an RDF schema to allow use of a query language
(i.e., SPARQL).  The schema is normative part of 802.21 draft and also
described in draft-ohba-802dot21-basic-schema-00.txt (this I-D is
submitted for a persistent URL of the RDF schema to be assigned by
IANA).


Best Regards,
Yoshihiro Ohba