Hi folks,
I couldn't resist sending on this "light" reading:
RFC 3251 "Electricity over IP"
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3251.txt
RFC 3252 "Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport (BLOAT)"
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3252.txt
Cheers,
- Ira McDonald
High North Inc
------------------------------
[from RFC 3251]
Abstract
Mostly Pointless Lamp Switching (MPLampS) is an architecture for
carrying electricity over IP (with an MPLS control plane). According
to our marketing department, MPLampS has the potential to
dramatically lower the price, ease the distribution and usage, and
improve the manageability of delivering electricity. This document
is motivated by such work as SONET/SDH over IP/MPLS (with apologies
to the authors). Readers of the previous work have been observed
scratching their heads and muttering, "What next?". This document
answers that question.
This document has also been written as a public service. The "Sub-
IP" area has been formed to give equal opportunity to those working
on technologies outside of traditional IP networking to write
complicated IETF documents. There are possibly many who are
wondering how to exploit this opportunity and attain high visibility.
Towards this goal, we see the topics of "foo-over-MPLS" (or MPLS
control for random technologies) as highly amenable for producing a
countless number of unimplementable documents. This document
illustrates the key ingredients that go into producing any "foo-
over-MPLS" document and may be used as a template for all such work.
[from RFC 3252]
Abstract
This document defines a reformulation of IP and two transport layer
protocols (TCP and UDP) as XML applications.
1. Introduction
1.1. Overview
This document describes the Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport
(BLOAT): a reformulation of a widely-deployed network-layer protocol
(IP [RFC791]), and two associated transport layer protocols (TCP
[RFC793] and UDP [RFC768]) as XML [XML] applications. It also
describes methods for transporting BLOAT over Ethernet and IEEE 802
networks as well as encapsulating BLOAT in IP for gatewaying BLOAT
across the public Internet.
1.2. Motivation
The wild popularity of XML as a basis for application-level protocols
such as the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol [RFC3080], the Simple
Object Access Protocol [SOAP], and Jabber [JABBER] prompted
investigation into the possibility of extending the use of XML in the
protocol stack. Using XML at both the transport and network layer in
addition to the application layer would provide for an amazing amount
of power and flexibility while removing dependencies on proprietary
and hard-to-understand binary protocols. This protocol unification
would also allow applications to use a single XML parser for all
aspects of their operation, eliminating developer time spent figuring
out the intricacies of each new protocol, and moving the hard work of
parsing to the XML toolset. The use of XML also mitigates concerns
over "network vs. host" byte ordering which is at the root of many
network application bugs.