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Welcome to the Yokohama IETF (again!)

  • Jari ArkkoIETF Chair

30 Oct 2015

Welcome to IETF-94, and back to Yokohama! We were here in 2002, yet I remember it like yesterday. The impression left by the scenery, the Japanese friendliness, food, and many other things was lasting!

Yokohama

First off, I wanted to note that the network is up, secretariat is ready to hand out badges, meeting rooms are ready, and we are eager to start the week! I also wanted to thank very much our host, WIDE project, and all the other sponsors who are making this event possible: IIJ, NTT Communications, Broadband Tower, Inc., Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, JPRS, KDDI, NEC, SoftBank, APNIC, Equinix, Otsuka, CTC, Dell, Extreme Networks, INTEC, JPNIC, net one, NISSHO Electronics, Nixi, Sakura Internet, Toshiba, A10 Networks, Alaxala, Cisco, NTT EAST, and Cisco DevNet. What a wonderful and long list of supporters!

Our week begins with Saturday and Sunday being full of coding, hacking, welcome receptions, and newcomers’ events. If you are already here, consider joining the IETF Hackathon to program cool new Internet tech. Code is what matters, after all. Or come help program IETF tools in the Code Sprint.

The one BOF that we have this time is the Internet Storage Sync (ISS) BoF on Tuesday. It proposes work on network-based storage services, such as Dropbox to allow users to sync local files with remote servers. Today, the sync protocols are proprietary, often inefficient or lacking in features. The BoF will consider whether we should standardize a new protocol to help these issues and provide interoperability among services. Read more information on the topic from github and from draft-cui-iss-problem. And join the discussion on the mailing list.

But this year we’ve already created 19 new working groups (and terminated 13), so do check out some of the other new efforts going on as well. These include, for instance, DETNET (Monday), DOTS (Tuesday), COSE (Tuesday), GEOJSON (Thursday), and LAGER (Thursday).

On Wednesday we will have the plenary session. This time both the technical and administrative plenaries will be held in one session. The focus in the session will be less on reporting and more on bringing up hot topics to discuss. All reports will be available in the meeting materials, and the meeting time is used more on issues that deserve your attention and discussion. We still have a technical topic as well, discussed in depth, followed by open discussion. The topic this time is “Measurement-Driven Protocol Engineering”.

On the break before the plenary, you may wish to join the screening of the film ‘Net of Rights’.

The operations area of the IETF is busy with more than 160 YANG data models in the different WGs. But the focus this week is not only on the management of specific protocols, but also (and maybe more importantly) on the coordination and interaction of all those models within the IETF and with other SDOs.

The transport area working group (TSVWG, Monday and Thursday) will be working on drafts that cover several aspects of tunneling, both specific encapsulations like GRE-over-IPv6 and general guidelines for encapsulation, ECN handling in tunneling, and “circuit breakers”. We’ll also get an update on the SPUD prototype, which generated considerable interest at the MaRNEW workshop in Atlanta. 

Finally, some additional thanks and practical arrangements. I wanted to thank the NOC team and the volunteers from WIDE. When I visited the NOC I counted twenty people in the room, all helping to set up the network. Much appreciated!

Wireless Access Point antennae
IETF 94 Network Operations Center
IETF 94 Network Operations Center

If you are unable to attend IETF 94 in person, you can participate remotely. Working Group sessions can be joined via Meetecho, or by listening to audio streams and participating in Jabber chat rooms. Additionally several sessions—the IRTF Open session, the plenary, and the Thursday Lunch Speaker Series session will be streamed live via that IETF’s YouTube channel (over both IPv4 and IPv6). These will also be available for on-demand viewing shortly after each session. For all the details, see the IETF Live webpage.

Check out also the rough guides to IETF-94 from ISOC, with lots of material covering the main events, as well as focusing on scalability, routing, and Internet Governance matters in particular.

Looking forward to seeing you all in the meeting or in the discussions over the Internet!


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