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  • A Journey from Surathkal to the IETF

    We are final-year undergraduate students majoring in Computer Science and Engineering at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) in the Surathkal town of Mangalore, India. IETF 122 in Bangkok marked our first in-person participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force – and what a journey it was.

    7 May 2025
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    30 Apr 2025
  • IETF 122 post-meeting survey

    IETF 122 Bangkok was held 15-21 March 2025 and the results of the post-meeting survey are now available on a web-based interactive dashboard.

    17 Apr 2025
  • IETF Snapshot 2024

    Want to catch up on IETF activity in 2024? How many RFCs were published? How many Internet-Drafts were submitted? How many Working Groups were chartered or concluded? The IETF Snapshot provides a short summary of IETF activity for the previous year.

    17 Apr 2025
  • Report from RPC Retreat 2025

    In early April 2025, the RFC Production Center (RPC) and IETF LLC senior staff met for the first RPC retreat following the contract change that now has the RPC reporting directly to the IETF Executive Director. This was a high-level retreat, the first of its kind for the RPC, looking at community requirements and the RPC internal processes that deliver those.

    16 Apr 2025

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Filter by topic and date

New IETF Area focuses on web and transport technologies

8 Oct 2024

The new Web and Internet Transport (WIT) area covers protocols that provide the functions of the transport layer of the Internet, including congestion control and queue management, real-time communication, as well as protocols that implement the World Wide Web and adjacent technologies.

Recognizing the increasing activity in application and real-time technologies and a shift in the technical work underway in the IETF, during 2023 the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) reviewed how best to organize Working Groups (WGs) into Areas. The result was the creation of the WIT Area, which began work with the IETF 119 Brisbane meeting held in March 2024. WIT took over from the Transport (TSV) Area and incorporated the web-related and real-time part of Application and Real-Time (ART) Area. One of the aims of this new area was to have cohesion around traditional Transport subjects and ART protocols that are often used as transports, especially HTTP.

Areas help connect IETF work on related technologies. They are managed by Area Directors (ADs) who are jointly responsible for making sure the WGs in the area are well coordinated, that there is coverage for the technologies needed in the area, and that the challenges most important to the Internet in that area are indeed being worked on. 

The WIT Area, with its two centers of gravity (transport layer and web applications), includes groups that work on technologies such as QUIC, TCP, UDP, SCTP, RTP, and MASQUE, and also groups working on technologies like HTTP, CoAP, and MOQ.

If you would like to learn more about work underway in the WIT area, many of the Working Groups will be meeting during the upcoming IETF 121 Dublin meeting. There will be meetings such as the TSV working group (TSVWG), QUIC, MOQ, HTTPbis, CoRE, WEBTRANS, and AVTCORE. Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions are good places to start if you are looking to learn more about work being considered, and the High Performance Wide Area Network (HPWAN) BoF will be held during IETF 121.

For any group you are interested in, be sure to join the mailing lists and review documents so you can be up to speed on discussions that will take place during IETF 121. The WITAREA mailing list archive includes summary Working Group reports from previous meetings, which give a high-level overview to the status of most WIT working groups. If you’d like, you can reach us on the main WIT Area mailing list or directly at wit-ads@ietf.org.


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