WG Action: RECHARTER: TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)

[IESG Secretary <iesg-secretary at ietf.org>]

The charter of the TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm) working group
in the Transport Area of the IETF has been updated. For additional
information, please contact the Area Directors or the working group Chairs.

+++

TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)
=============================================

Current Status: Active Working Group 

Chair(s):
Ted Faber <faber at isi.edu> 
Mark Allman <mallman at icir.org> 

Transport Area Director(s):
Allison Mankin <mankin at psg.com> 
Jon Peterson <jon.peterson at neustar.biz> 

Transport Area Advisor:
Jon Peterson <jon.peterson at neustar.biz> 

Mailing Lists:
General Discussion: tcpm at 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. 

Milestones: 

Apr 06 Submit NCR Reordering Mitigation draft to the IESG for 
publication as an Experimental RFC. 

Apr 06 Submit ECN-SYN document to the IESG for publication as a 
Proposed Standard RFC. 

May 06 Submit overview of spoofing attacks against TCP to IESG 
for publication as an Informational RFC. 

May 06 Submit In-Window Attack draft to IESG for publication as 
a Proposed Standard RFC. 

May 06 Submit User TimeOut option document to the IESG for 
publication as a Proposed Standard RFC. 

May 06 Submit soft errors document to the IESG for publication 
as an Informational RFC. 



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