Subject: Public Datanet Working Group

From: "jim (j.) cobban" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 11:15:00 -0400

The objective of the new public-datanet working group of the APPN
Architecture SIG is to prepare a set of recommendations for changes to the
Architecture of Record to more effectively support the use of public data
network interfaces such as X.25, Frame-Relay, ISDN, and ATM.  Note that
although these interfaces were developed for public data networks they are
often used in private networks as well.

I believe that it is premature to leap to a solution until we have categorized
the requirements.  The first order of business therefore is to agree on the
requirements.  As I see these requirements they are:

  1) From the point of view of network management there should be a
     one-to-one correspondence between the Port component as viewed by APPN
     and a Port as represented by an electrical interface.

  2) Where public networks support switched connections with a universal
     addressing scheme and transitive connectivity they should also
     support connection networks.  This implies the need
     to specify the exact format of the DLC specific subfield[s] of the
     TG Descriptor control vector (X'46') for interoperability.  In this the
     working group will continue an activity started by the DLUR SIG.

  3) Where public networks support multicasting, support for discovery
     should be described.

  4) Since there are a very wide, and growing, set of different public data
     network interfaces, the support for the unique characteristics of these
     interfaces should be completely isolated in the DLC specific code.  This
     is different from the current implementations where knowledge of the 6+1
     byte addresses of SATF networks is distributed through CS, SS, and TRS.
     We do not want to further complicate these components with knowledge of
     the internals of additional DLC types.  The existing SATF specific
     addressing support should be phased out of implementations.

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