[802.3_OMEGA] Response to 802.1 comment

[ROBERT GROW <bobgrow@xxxxxxx>]

Colleagues:

I’ve changed my mind on what is appropriate for a response to 802.1 (change marks in Motions, CSD, Economic Feasibility, and content in Responses).  Mr. Law provided some research to back up Mr. Thompson’s earlier OMEGA reflector comment on what is infrastructure.  I stole text from Mr. Law’s email to create the following:

Economic Feasibility

• –  “The balance of costs between infrastructure and attached stations is not applicable to the automotive environment.”

• –  This statement is unclear to 802.1. Infrastructure includes bridges and routers, and we believe there are both infrastructure and attached stations within the automotive environment. Furthermore, we believe the balance of costs between these components of the solution is critical to the success of 802 technologies in the automotive environment.

• –  Please clarify your evaluation of the balance of costs. 

Response

Reject.

In subclause 14.2.5 'Economic Feasibility' of the IEEE 802 Operations Manual you will find that it reads 'Balanced costs (infrastructure versus attached stations)'. Subclause 3.1 'Definitions' of IEEE Std 802-2014 IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks: Overview and Architecture defines 'station' as 'An end station or bridge. See also: bridge; end station.' and 'end station' as 'A functional unit in an IEEE 802® network that acts as a source of, and/or destination for, link layer data traffic carried on the network.'.

As a result the IEEE 802 Overview and Architecture defines both a bridge and a router (as a source and destination for link layer data traffic carried on the network) as a station. Since this criteria includes the text 'infrastructure versus attached stations', and since both a bridge and a router is a station, and therefore cannot be infrastructure, The statement 'Infrastructure includes bridges and routers ...' in the IEEE 802.1 comments is not correct. 

We assert that neither infrastructure as defined nor your inclusion of bridges and routers into infrastructure does not apply to automotive networks because they are very different from enterprise networks and other network types where 802 technologies have traditionally applied.  An automotive network is heavily engineered from qualified subsystems (e.g., cable harness, electronic control units, etc.); and then replicated millions of times for installation in individual vehicles.  Unlike an enterprise network, bridge and router functionality may not be a distinct device in an automotive network, it may be one function of a electronic control unit which may also include functions that might be considered a server in an enterprise network.

I will delete the change marks to the Economic Feasibility slide in the Motions file for presentation in ~21 hours, and update the Responses file with the above response text.  

Of course, the SG will determine if my recommendations are good or not on the call.

—Bob

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