RFC 1673 (rfc1673) - Page 2 of 4

Electric Power Research Institute Comments on IPng

RFC 1673                 EPRI Comments on IPng               August 1994


   international standards.

   These specifications have been incorporated into the Industry
   Government Open Systems Specification (IGOSS).  They are receiving
   favorable response and application by the industry and its suppliers
   as well as the support of the natural gas and waterworks industries.

   The issues facing the Internet community concerning growth and the
   address and routing limitations of IP in particular, provide an ideal
   opportunity for creating the  national uniform information transport
   superhighway. This is critical to the NII Agenda and the only
   proposal that will achieve this goal is one that is acceptable from
   both private and public sector viewpoints with both a national and an
   international perspective.

   EPRI also believes it is critically important that new requirements
   need to be achieved by convergence of efforts to develop additional
   standards.  Security, directory services, network management, and the
   ability to support real-time applications are four examples of where
   new convergent standards efforts are required.

   Just as society could not in the past accept multiple standards for
   the gauge of the nation's railways,  we can no longer accept multiple
   standards for information transport.

Engineering Considerations

   1. Mandatory Requirement.

      Inter networking must evolve to provide an industrial strength
      computing and communications environment for multiple uses of
      globally connected network resources.  Specifically the underlying
      transport must provide high integrity support for upper layer
      industrial OSI applications including but not limited to MMS  and
      TP. Use of interface layers such as RFC 1006 is not acceptable
      except as a transition strategy.

   2. Basic Requirements.

      - Scaleability
        The addressing scheme must have essentially an unlimited address
        space to encompass an arbitrarily large number of information
        objects.  Specifically it must solve the fundamental limitations
        of 32 bit formats, a format for 20 octets and above is considered
        suitable.






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