[802.3AZ] project update
Dear Colleagues,
The January meeting was very productive.   If you read the draft you 
know there were still a number of TBDs and open items to be resolved, 
some being cross references and others being unspecified values.  We 
made significant progress, however I don't believe we made enough 
progress to be able to go to working group ballot in March.  I know many 
task force members worked very hard to try to meet this milestone, but 
even incorporating the work from the meeting into draft 1.2 will not 
make a technically complete draft. 
Although we improved the draft with respect to the use of LLDP, we still 
have much to do.  I have chartered an ad-hoc committee, called the L2 
ad-hoc, to use the framework in diab_01_0109.pdf as adopted by the task 
force to come up with a way to exchange initial values for system wake 
time and to negotiate the system wake time dynamically.  The chair of 
this ad-hoc is Wael Diab.  Wael will use the existing EEE reflector to 
communicate with ad-hoc participants.  If you're interested in 
participating, please contact him.  Wael will report the results of the 
ad-hoc at the text task force meeting.
Another issue needing work is the system wait time as described in 
law_01_0109v3.pdf.  David identified cases where there could be 
shrinkage in the system wake time. He introduced new variables, 
including one for a default system wake time as well as parameters to 
specify shrinkage.  The task force adopted the material in his 
presentation as a baseline to be incorporated in the next draft.  I have 
chartered an ad-hoc committee to develop this work with the goal of 
determining values for default, wake, and "shrink" parameters for review 
at the next task force meeting.  This will be the "shrinkage" ad-hoc and 
David Law is the chair of the ad-hoc.  If you would like to participate 
in this ad-hoc, please contact him.  Although I did not discuss how he 
intends to communicate with the participants with him, I think the EEE 
reflector would be fine to start.
The July plenary meeting is our next opportunity to submit a draft for 
Working Group Ballot.  I will be working with folks to determine what 
else needs to be done to have a technically complete draft ready for 
submission and will send a list of things we need to accomplish to the 
reflector when that is ready.  Our review cycle for draft 1.2 is as follows:
Begin review of draft 1.2:       February 4, 2009
Comment deadline:                February 24, 2009
Proposed responses posted:  March 3, 2009
Once again I would like to thank everyone who has worked on the draft 
for getting us this far.  Although we are slipping with respect to our 
original time-line, I am hopeful that we will spend less time in Working 
Group Ballot as a result of the extra effort we will put into the draft 
in Task Force Review.
Best regards,
Mike
--
Michael J. Bennett
Chair, IEEE P802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet Task Force
Tel. 510.486.7913