TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)

Last Modified: 2008-04-23

Additional information is available at tools.ietf.org/wg/tcpm

Chair(s):

  • Ted Faber <faber@isi.edu>

  • Mark Allman <mallman@icir.org>

    Transport Area Director(s):

  • Magnus Westerlund <magnus.westerlund@ericsson.com>
  • Lars Eggert <lars.eggert@nokia.com>

    Transport Area Advisor:

  • Lars Eggert <lars.eggert@nokia.com>

    Mailing Lists:

    General Discussion: tcpm@ietf.org
    To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tcpm
    Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpm/index.html

    Description of Working Group:

    TCP is currently the Internet's predominant transport protocol.
    To maintain TCP's utility the IETF has regularly updated both
    the protocol itself and the congestion control algorithms
    implemented by the protocol that are crucial for the stability
    of the Internet. These changes reflect our evolving
    understanding of transport protocols, congestion control and new
    needs presented by an ever-changing network. The TCPM WG will
    provide a venue within the IETF to work on these issues. The WG
    will serve several purposes:

    * The WG will mostly focus on maintenance issues (e.g., bug
    fixes) and modest changes to the protocol and algorithms
    that maintain TCP's utility.

    * The WG will be a venue for moving current TCP specifications
    along the standards track (as community energy is available
    for such efforts).

    * The WG will write a document that outlines "what is TCP".
    This document will be a roadmap of sorts to the various TCP
    specifications in the RFC series.

    TCPM will take a subset of the work which has been conducted in
    the Transport Area WG over the past several years.
    Specifically, some of the WG's initial work will be moved from
    the Transport Area WG (tsvwg).

    TCPM is expected to be the working group within the IETF to
    handle TCP changes. Proposals for additional TCP work items
    should be brought up within the working group. While
    fundamental changes to TCP or its congestion control algorithms
    (e.g., departure from loss-based congestion control) should be
    brought through TCPM, it is expected that such large changes
    will ultimately be handled by the Transport Area WG (tsvwg).
    All additional work items for TCPM will, naturally, require the
    approval of the Transport Services Area Area Directors and the
    IESG.

    TCP's congestion control algorithms are the model followed by
    alternate transports (e.g., SCTP and (in some cases) DCCP). In
    addition, the IETF has recently worked on several documents
    about algorithms that are specified for multiple protocols
    (e.g., TCP and SCTP) in the same document. Which WG shepherds
    such documents in the future will determined on a case-by-case
    basis. In any case, the TCPM WG will remain in close contact
    with other relevant WGs working on these protocols to ensure
    openness and stringent review from all angles.

    Specific Goals:

    * A document specifying a way to share the local "User TimeOut"
    value with the peer such that TCP connections can withstand long
    periods of disconnection.

    * The WG is working on an experimental technique to add robustness
    to TCP against packet reordering having a negative impact on
    performance.

    * The WG is coming to grips with how to deal with spoofed segments
    that can tear down connections, cause data corruption or
    performance problems. To this end the WG is generating an
    overview document as well as a scheme that mitigates some of the
    spoofed segment issues using a challenge-response scheme to
    reduce the probabilities of a connection being impacted.

    * The WG is writing an informational document about the ways in
    which TCPs can handle ICMP "soft errors".

    * The WG is updating the specification for Explicit Congestion
    Notification to allow for the use of ECN during part of TCP's
    three-way handshake to aid performance for short transfers.

    Goals and Milestones:

    Done  Submit FRTO draft to IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC
    Done  Submit TCP Roadmap document to IESG for publication as a Best Current Practices RFC
    Done  Submit NCR Reordering Mitigation draft to the IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC
    Sep 2006  Submit overview of spoofing attacks against TCP to IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.
    Oct 2006  Submit In-Window Attack draft to IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
    Oct 2006  Submit revision of RFC 2581 to the IESG for publication as a Draft Standard.
    Nov 2006  Submit User TimeOut option document to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
    Nov 2006  Submit ECN-SYN document to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
    Jan 2007  Submit SYN flooding document to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.
    Jan 2007  Submit soft errors document to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.
    Jan 2007  Submit ICMP attack document to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.

    Internet-Drafts:

    Improving TCP's Robustness to Blind In-Window Attacks (44867 bytes)
    Adding Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Capability to TCP's SYN/ACK Packets (61843 bytes)
    TCP Congestion Control (45152 bytes)
    TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors (36460 bytes)
    ICMP attacks against TCP (86979 bytes)
    TCP Extensions for High Performance (104812 bytes)

    Request For Comments:

    Forward RTO-Recovery (F-RTO): An Algorithm for Detecting Spurious Retransmission Timeouts with TCP and the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) (RFC 4138) (55538 bytes)
    Improving the Robustness of TCP to Non-Congestion Events (RFC 4653) (42268 bytes)
    A Roadmap for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Specification Documents (RFC 4614) (75645 bytes)
    Defending TCP Against Spoofing Attacks (RFC 4953) (72756 bytes)
    TCP SYN Flooding Attacks and Common Mitigations (RFC 4987) (48753 bytes)
    IETF Secretariat - Please send questions, comments, and/or suggestions to ietf-web@ietf.org.

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