To:

Yoichi Maeda <

Greg Jones <>

Ghani Abbas <

Huub Van Helvoort <

Malcolm Betts <>

Hing-Kam Lam <

<>

From:

Loa Andersson <>

CC:

David Ward <

Ross Callon <>

Mark Townsley <>

Jari Arkko <>

Scott Bradner <>

Russ Housley <>

Olaf Kolkman <>

IETF MEAD team <>

ITU-T SG15, Q 9/15, Q10/15, Q12/15 and Q14/15

Source: IETF chair, IAB chair, IETF MEAD team chair

Title: Cooperation between IETF and ITU-T on the Development of MPLS-TP

For: Action

Deadline: March 31, 2009

Dear Mr. Maeda, Mr. Abbas, Mr. van Helvoort, Mr. Betts and Mr. Lam

Thanks for your liaisons “Cooperation between IETF and ITU-T on the Development of MPLS-TP” and “Improving communication between IETF and ITU-T on MPLS-TP”.

We are pleased that the information channels between the two organizations have significantly improved e.g. with the ITU-T SG15 reviews of IETF Internet Drafts on MPLS-TP requirements and MPLS-TP OAM.

The IETF leadership find it very encouraging that you have clearly stated that no further work on T-MPLS will be undertaken by ITU-T and that initiated the process to deprecate the existing T-MPLS Recommendations and that you will discontinue the use of the T-MPLS acronym and concepts.

We note that responses to comments on IETF documents received from the ITU-T will be treated according to normal IETF processes; authors and/or editors updates the drafts and send an e-mail to the appropriate mailing lists (including the MPLS-TP ad hoc team list) outlining how they responded to the comments.

However, in order to foster communication between the two bodies, we believe that the following items need to be agreed on and or communicated from the ITU-T to the IETF:

1.  First, we need to understand when we have received all the relevant MPLS-TP requirements from ITU-T, if this date is pressed to far into the future this will have an impact on the target date for the MPLS-TP RFCs.

2.  Second, we need to have a clear understanding of which documents we need to have approved as RFCs for the SG15 meeting in October 2009.

3.  Third, we see a need to further define the process, regarding ITU-T review of our Internet-Drafts as well as IETF review of ITU-T Draft Recommendations before they are published as RFCs or Approved Recommendations.

4.  Fourth, we see that there is a need to coordinate between our two organizations so that T-MPLS related contributions to the ITU-T are not accepted into SG or Question meetings.

5.  Finally, we need the OAM deployment scenarios that we were promised at the SG15 meeting in Geneva.

While the deadline on this liaison says March 31 it is important to have timely answers to the bullets above. Please understand that bullet number 5 is already delaying the work within the IETF, bullet number 2 have the potential to a huge impact, while streamlining the inter-SDO processes is important and should be done timely. Getting to a closure on the MPLS-TP requirements should be done during newly imitated working group last call.

It is our understanding that most of the ITU-T work will be done by normative references to IETF RFCs and that new text will be kept to a minimum.

Loa Andersson

Chair of the IETF MEAD team