IP: Next Generation Area Directors: o Scott Bradner: sob@harvard.edu o Allison Mankin: mankin@cmf.nrl.navy.mil Area Summary reported by Scott Bradner/Harvard and Allison Mankin/NRL Since the creation of the IPng Area late last year the focus has been on two primary tasks: developing a reasonable estimate of the projected lifetime for the IPv4 address space and producing a draft requirements document. The Address Lifetime Expectations Working Group (ALE), chaired by Frank Solensky and Tony Li, reported during a session held at the IETF meeting in Seattle that their current estimate was that the IPv4 address supply would be exhausted in the year 2008 (plus or minus 3 years), assuming no changes in the basic rate of growth in the demand for addresses. Clearly, if there was a request for a very large block (many millions) of addresses, it would affect this estimate. The Transition and Coexistence Including Testing BOF (TACIT), chaired by Atul Bansal and Geoff Huston, had its first meeting in Seattle. This group will focus on the long term transition and coexistence issues and will define recommendations for testing IPng specifications and implementations. Of course, the working groups for each of the IPng candidates have been busy and did meet in Seattle to further refine the details of their proposals. The IPng Requirements BOF (NGREQS), chaired by Frank Kastenholz and Jon Crowcroft, has produced a draft of an IPng requirements document. The current draft is a refinement of an initial document by Frank Kastenholz and Craig Partridge. It reflects input from a number of the White Papers that the IPng Area solicited with RFC 1550, and comments from the IPng Directorate. The requirements draft is ready for public comment. It has been published as an Internet-Draft (draft-kastenholz-ipng-criteria-01.txt). We need as many comments as possible by 10 May. All interested persons should take a look at this document and, if you have comments or suggestions, send them to the big-internet list. (Send a note to big-internet-request@munnari.oz.au to subscribe.) You should also take a look at the RFC 1550 White Papers---they have been published as Internet-Drafts. Look for any Internet-Draft with ``ipng'' in its filename. All of these documents are available at you favorite Internet-Drafts site and from hsdndev.harvard.edu in pub/ipng/wp for anonymous FTP. Hsdndev also allows Gopher access. The IPng Directorate mailing list archives and directorate teleconference minutes are also available from hsdndev. We urge you to take a look at these documents and records. Let us know on the big-internet list or in private mail what you think. This is an effort that will effect us all and anyone who can help make the result better or the transition easier is encouraged to participate. We are still on track to present our recommendation on IPng at the Toronto IETF at the end of July. Below are summaries for each of the groups that met at the Seattle IETF. Four IPng working groups, three IPng BOFs, and an open IPng Directorate meeting were held. Address Extension by IP Option Usage BOF (AEIOU) Brian Carpenter presented the AEIOU proposal (draft-carpenter-aeiou-00.txt) and there was a lively discussion. Most people felt that AEIOU would work and could, with effort, be developed into a viable stop-gap solution. There was one significant technical issue, the impact of option analysis on local router performance. The main debate was whether the savings in work and time to implement and deploy AEIOU compared to a full IPng solution were significant and worthwhile. There was a range of views on this. The conclusion was not to propose an AEIOU Working Group at this time, but to document the proposal (possibly as an Informational RFC) to keep it in reserve for future eventualities. Interested people should contact Brian Carpenter. IPng Requirements BOF (NGREQS) The group had a number of presentations from members of the community who are experts in particular technical areas. These included Mike St. Johns on security, Greg Minshall on mobility, Dave Clark on network services, Lixia Zhang on RSVP, Mark Handly on AVT, Peter Ford on backbones, and John Curran on market needs. The intent was to give the group background information on these particular areas and their specific needs -- similar to the White Papers solicited by the IPng Directorate. The members then proceeded into a lively and spirited debate on the various criteria. The community suggested many significant improvements which are still being digested by the chairs and authors. One important improvement that seemed to have great support from the community was that the requirements should be strengthened amd made firmer -- fewer ``should allows'' and the like and more ``musts.'' Transition and Coexistence Including Testing BOF (TACIT) The group discussed the issues relating to transition and coexistence in general terms as they relate to the constituency of the Internet, and also discussed the specific issues relating to potential IPng transition environments. The view was expressed that the characteristics and potential time frame of transition, coexistence and testing processes will be greatly influenced through the interplay of market forces within the Internet, and that any IPng transition plan should recognize these motivations and provide ample levels of opportunity identification to encourage the broad Internet constituency to subscribe to the transition process (and therefore undertake to meet the associated deployment costs of such a transition). The group decided to recommend to the IPng Area Directorate to form a working group to explore the generic issues of the IPng transition process and gather experience from previous technology transitions that have occurred both within the Internet and within related networking technologies. A draft charter was reviewed, with the view that this working group would contribute to the IPng process by identifying these issues and reviewing IPng transition plans at the appropriate phase of the IPng process. Address Lifetime Expectations Working Group (ALE) The ALE Working Group met to discuss its projections and future mechanisms for improving the lifetime of the address space. The current projections were presented and subsequent discussion ensued. As a result, ALE will also begin to track routing table sizes. People have volunteered to collect data. Address efficiency was discussed, and there is a volunteer to produce a document on improving address space efficiency. RFC 1597 was presented, and was thought to be very helpful. The IPng timetable was discussed, but the group was unable to come to any reasonable conclusions due to uncertainty about the deployment of CIDR and the explosion of the routing tables. Common Architecture for Next Generation IP Working Group (CATNIP) The meeting was chaired pro tem by Robert Ullmann, as Vladimir Sukonnik was unable to attend. Robert did a small soapbox on the proper scope of the IPng proposals. This was followed by discussion of a number of minor technical issues identified recently on the CATNIP list. Several IPX-related issues were left uncertain. The issue of TUBA TCP and UDP checksums will be discussed with the TUBA Working Group. DNS issues will be resolved in a future revision of the Collela/Manning draft which will be used by both TUBA and CATNIP. Fragment translation was discussed, with the differing semantics between CLNP, IPv4, and SIPP making it less useful than would be expected. Simple Internet Protocol Plus Working Group (SIPP) The SIPP Working Group held an implementors meeting on Sunday afternoon and two working group sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. Bob Hinden presented a summary of recent working group activities. This included that the SIPP charter had been approved, the SIPP White Paper had been completed on time, a summary of the SIPP specifications which had been completed since the last IETF meeting, and the SIPP specifications which were submitted to the IPng Area Directors for publication as Experimental RFCs. Also presented was the announcement that Mosaic pages had been created for the SIPP Working Group. These can be found at URL http://town.hall.org. Jim Bound presented a summary of the implementors meeting. A number of SIPP implementors had attended and several refinements had been made to some of the SIPP options based on implementation experience. These changes will be documented in an update to the SIPP specification. Steve Deering presented an overview of the changes from last fall's SIP specification to the current SIPP specification. This included details on the layout of the Flow ID. Ramesh Govindan and Sue Thompson presented the current approach for dealing with auto-configuration and discovery. This resolved the issues that were outstanding with the current drafts. New specifications will be published. Bob Gilligan presented an overview of IPAE. This resulted in a discussion of some of the details of IPAE and uncovered a bug. There was general agreement that IPAE needs to be simplified. This will be worked on and the specification will be updated. TCP/UDP Over CLNP-Addressed Networks Working Group (TUBA) During the Seattle IETF, the TUBA Working Group met twice to discuss the following issues: CLNP and protocol-independent multicast, electronic availability of ISO standards, flows in CLNP, the TUBA transition document and plan, and mobile CLNP hosts. Presentations were given by Dave Marlow, Dino Farinacci, Bob Brenner, Ross Callon, Lyman Chapin, and Dave Piscitello.