[IPFIX] Application of IPFIX to new application spaces.

Whilst I accept that IPFIX is pretty much complete in terms of
addressing it's original goals as a network management
protocol, I have some concerns about it's completeness
as an  observation reporting protocol. I think these need
to be addressed, before declaring completion of the work
programme as a whole.

(In my own time) I am looking at the definition of a protocol
to observe and report the radio noise floor. The purpose
is to map the rise in the radio noise floor due to RF pollution
from domestic and industrial digital systems such as
plasma televisions, and power line (digital) transmission
systems. IPFIX is a good protocol for such mass observations,
and has been used successfully in the radio propagation
monitoring system pskreporter.

In doing this I ran into two problems, firstly there are no
experimental IE types, and thus I cannot prototype the
application without either "camping" on a set of IEs, or
waiting until I am allocated a PEN. For reasons that will
be clear from other work I have done in the IETF, I dislike
the idea of "camping" on code-points. This makes it clear
to me that we need a small, but not trivial set of
experimental IEs that are intended for prototyping but
explicitly excluded from use in production systems.
This needs to be a reasonable number since a new application
space might need a fair number of IEs to be practical.
Thus I think that we need to either allocate some of the
base protocol IEs to experimental, or to have IANA
allocate a PEN specifically to experimental use which
would allow experimentation in new applications spaces
without the need to formally allocate IEs in either the
base IE space, or the PEN space of the organization
(or person) conducting the experiment.

The second problem that I see is the lack of a public registry
for non-network managements applications. Specifically
I am going to need "callsign", "maidenhead locator",
"frequency", "noise power", maybe "field strength", "receiver type"
etc. Now some of those may be of general use (frequency)
but most of them would be cruft in the base protocol IE set
which is set up for networking applications. On the other hand,
I know of at least one PEN space that will have a number of the
terms I need already defined, although these are by
definition private. With the current IE registration structure
the absence of a public registry inevitably means the
redefinition of other than mainstream/network management
terms across a number of private registries. I thus think
it would be useful to introduce a PEN + registry for
"other applications" or introduce the concept of a series
of application specific registries with appropriate  PENs to
identify the application space rather than  the private
enterprise space.

- Stewart


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