Subject: [re-ECN] Advancing CONEX work

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:20:01 -0000

The draft Charter is on next week's IESG agenda, so hopefully we'll hear
some good news soon. We've asked for a session in Anaheim, on the basis
that we'll either have a WG by then or else we can have a "working" bof
as the charter will be near final sign-off.

So we should make progress on the first items of our presumed charter:

>>Feb 2010 Internet-Draft functionality statement (Output item 1A) Mar 
>>2010 Internet-Draft applicability statement (Output item 1A, B, C)

The idea was for some short intensive discussion on "functionality",
then some short intensive discussion on deployability & security goals.

The best step might be for a volunteer(s) please to be "editor" on this
initial item(s). The role would be to summarise the existing thinking,
as a first step, and then to lead /capture discussion.

Hopefully the output can be quite short - a number of bullets such as "a
mechanism to allow senders to inform the network of the level of
congestion they expect their packets to encounter"; "the information the
sender adds is a RTT out of date"; etc. 

In more detail:-

1. An applicability statement that describes:

A. the functionality / capability that is expected to be provided by the
CONEX mechanism itself, including its architectural features,
limitations and assumptions it makes about networks and end systems

B. deployability goals - how the CONEX mechanism can be deployed in
networks (non vs ECN vs perhaps CONEX routers) and end systems

C. security goals - addressing threats from falsifying or blanking CONEX
info

The purpose is

[1] to detail the key functional and non-functional considerations that
guide the work on the mechanism's design

[2] to allow exploration of use cases to begin before work on the
mechanism is complete

[3] to provide an intuitive explanation of the new concepts in CONEX

Please shout if you'd like to volunteer to be "editor" on this initial
item(s). 

Thanks
Leslie & Phil.