Re: Terminology/intro draft

[Steve Deering <deering@cisco.com>]

Are people comfortable with using terms like "uplink" and "downlink"
for terrestrial UDLs, like cable networks?  After all, this working
group is chartered to deal with the generic problem of non-transitive
links, not just satellite links.  Uplink and downlink are familiar
satellite jargon (where there is an obvious notion of "up" and "down"),
whereas cable networks have their own jargon, e.g., "head-end".  I was
going to suggest the more generic and consistent, but prosaic, terms
"send-only interface", "receive-only interface" and "bi-directional
interface", but those are long and ugly, and would just end up being
acronymized to SOI, ROI, and BDI, which is even worse.  So I think
"uplink" and "downlink" are OK, as long as the non-satellite folks can
live with those terms.

You may want to add the term "bilink" for a UDL interface capable of
both transmission and reception, e.g., a satellite uplink groundstation
with receive capability.

> Feed	  A feed is a traffic flow which transit through an uplink, and
> 	  is transmitted along a unidirectional	link layer.

What's so special about an IP traffic flow that happens to travel over
a satellite, that it needs its own special term?

Steve