Subject: tsv-dir review of draft-ietf-mile-rfc4046-bis-05

From: Mark Allman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:52:50 -0500

I've reviewed this document as part of the transport area directorate's
ongoing effort to review key IETF documents. These comments were written
primarily for the transport area directors, but are copied to the
document's authors for their information and to allow them to address
any issues raised. The authors should consider this review together with
any other last-call comments they receive. Please always CC
[email-masked] if you reply to or forward this review. 

This draft is basically ready for publication, but has nits that should
be fixed before publication. 

In reading this document I flagged two issues.  Neither of them huge,
but I'd think perhaps they should be addressed before publication.

(1) The language is a little wonky in my opinion.  The document is
    laying out a 'transport protocol'.  But, while this protocol does
    transport bits of data this is absolutely not a layer 4 protocol and
    so I was initially a bit confused.  This draft lays out an
    application layer protocol (a slightly tweaked version of HTTP to be
    exact).  It would seem useful to me to clean this up.

(2) I wondered why the document said hosts MUST use port 4590.
    Certainly having a well know port is useful in many cases.  But, I
    don't see why some consortium couldn't decide they were going to use
    port 4545 or whatever.  Likewise, when setting up a callback it'd
    seem straightforward to give a port number, as well.

    I am not sure it is the biggest deal in the world, but a solution
    that leveraged late binding would strikes me as more flexible and
    hence better.

allman