Multiprotocol Transport BOF (MPTRANS) Reported by Sig Handelman/IBM Corporation The MPTRANS BOF was divided into two parts. The first was devoted to a presentation by Diane Pozefsky, of IBM Raleigh, on MPTRANS and its development in IBM's ANYNET products. The second was devoted to discussion. Presentation Diane presented the model of using MPTRANS to effect upper level services over different lower level transport layers in a general manner instead of encapsulation. The benefit of doing this is that it protects customers' applications from network changes, and minimizes the need to have multiple staffs to handle the case of encapsulated networks. Diane classified the challenges in building Multiprotocol networks using MPTRANS into the following areas: o Function Compensation - Function compensation is the idea of converting various elements of network protocols such as multicast, user expedited, records and streams. o Address Mapping - Addressing may either be algorithmic (e.g., IP over SNA) or more complicated with the use of an address mapper. o Transport Gateway - An example of a transport gateway is the product Anynet/2. o Network Management - Network management is done in terms of the ``lowest level'' carrier network. ANYNET today works with the following Multiprotocol Combinations: SNA over TCP, Sockets over SNA, Netbios over SNA and Sockets over Netbios. This topic is important to the IETF because it promotes sockets over any transport, promotes IP networking over any applications and migrates to IPng any current application. Discussion Several questions were asked by the audience. They included: How are MTUs converted? Why come to the IETF? Has MPTRANS looked at Negotiated Quality Of Service? The following points were brought up in closing: MPTRANS is not suitable for IETF standardization today because of X/Open; Informational RFCs should be written; MPTRANS can be used to extend SNA traffic over TCP/IP, and help TN3270E; and MPTRANS can be used as a model for the conversion of traffic for IPng. The meeting resulted in the following action items: publish Internet-Drafts and Informational RFCs on MPTRANS, and follow-up with the committees on TN3270E and IPng on sharing ideas.