New Work at Upcoming IETF 99 Meeting

We did this last week in preparation for IETF 99 and I wanted to report the conclusions:

BANdwidth Aggregation for interNet Access (BANANA) will be having a working-group-forming Birds of a Feather (BOF) session at IETF 99. BANANA is concerned with providing coordinated Internet Access to a device over multiple links of different types to allow for increased bandwidth utilization, load-balancing and/or higher reliability. The goal of this BOF is to determine whether the scope of the problem is well defined and understood, whether there is a critical mass of participants willing to work on the problem, and whether in general the working group would have a reasonable probability of success if chartered. The BANANA mailing list is here.

IDentity Enabled Networks (IDEAS) will be having a working-group-forming BOF. The goal of this work is to standardize a framework that provides identity-based services that can be used by any identifier-location separation protocol. The new requirements driving this framework go beyond the traditional discovery service and mapping of identifier-to-location for packet delivery. The goal of the BOF is to identify what specific work items are appropriate for IETF standardization. The IDEAS mailing list is here.

Network Slicing (NETSLICING) will be having a non-working-group-forming BOF. In this work proposal, a “network slice” is conceptualized as a logical network comprised of the union of resources (connectivity, storage, computing), network functions, and service functions. Network slicing is a concept garnering much attention as part of 5G standardization and development efforts. The goal of the BoF is to identify whether a shared understanding exists of terminology, decomposition of the problem space, and relationships between the goals of the work and existing protocol work in other IETF working groups. Getting clarity on the priority of relevant requirements from 3GPP is also critical. The relevant mailing list is here.

We also received a proposal for a WG-forming BOF concerning 5G IP Access and Session Management Protocols (5GIP), which was not approved for this meeting cycle so as to provide more time for refinement. The responsible area director and others in the IESG and IAB who have been exploring the overlap between 5G and IETF work will continue to engage with the proponents to help gain more clarity, refine scoping, and understand overlaps with other SDOs.

Finally, we’ll have one newly chartered working group meeting for the first time at IETF 99: DKIM Crypto Update (DCRUP). The DCRUP working group is chartered to update DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM, RFC 6376) to handle more modern cryptographic algorithms and key sizes. The mailing list is here.

Looking forward to productive discussions in all these areas at IETF 99.