Allison Mankin -- Wed, 27 April 1994 -- B-I =========================================== IPng Update This is a quick update on the status of the IETF IPng effort. Since the creation of the IPng area late last year we have been focused on two primary tasks; developing a reasonable estimate of the projected lifetime for the IPv4 address space and producing a draft requirements document. The IPv4 Address 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 were a request for a very large block (many millions) of addresses, it would affect this estimate. The Transition and Coexistence Including Testing (TACIT) working group, 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, 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 RFC1550 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 May 10. All interested persons (that should be just about all reading this message) 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 RFC1550 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. Appended to this update is the area status report from the Seattle IETF meeting. Scott & Allison IETF 29 IP: Next Generation Area Report Seattle, Washington Scott Bradner Allison Mankin Meetings of 4 IP: Next Generation working group, 3 BOFs, and an open IPng directorate meeting were held during the 29th IETF meeting in Seattle, Washington. Address Extension by IP Option Utilisation BOF (AEIOU) Reported by Peter Ford Chair Brian Carpenter 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@dxcoms.cern.ch. Address Lifetime Expectations WG (ALE) Reported by Tony Li Chairs: Tony Li , Frank Solensky The ALE WG met to discuss its projections and future mechanisms for improving the lifetime of the address space. Our current projections were presented and subsequent discussion ensued. As a result, ALE will also begin to track routing table sizes. We have volunteers to collect data for us. We discussed address efficiency and have a volunteer to produce a document on improving address space efficiency. RFC 1597 was presented, and was thought to be very helpful. We discussed the timetable for IPng, but were 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 WG (CATNIP) Reported by Robert Ullmann Chair (pro tem) Robert Ullmann WG 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 to be discussed with the TUBA WG. DNS issues to be resolved in a near future revision of the Collela/Manning draft which will be used by both TUBA and CATNIP. Fragment translation was discussed, with the differring semantics between CLNP, IPv4, and SIPP making it less useful than would be expected. IPNG Requirements WG (NGREQS) Reported by Frank Kastenholz Chairs Jon Crowcroft , Frank Kastenholz The working group had a number of presentations from members of the community who are experts in particular technical areas. These included Mike StJohns 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 Directorate. The working group 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". SIPP WG Reported by Bob Hinden Chair Bob Hinden March 1994 IETF The SIPP working group held a 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 Whitepaper 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 RFC's. Also presented was the announcement that Mosaic pages had been created for the SIPP working group. These can be found at 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 spec 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. The Transition and Coexistence including Testing (TACIT) BOF Reported by Geoff Huston Chairs: Geoff Huston Atul Bansal The BOF 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 timeframe 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 recognise these motivations and provide ample levels 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 transition). The group decided to recommend to the IPNG Area Directoriate to form a Working Group to explore the generic issues of the IPng transition process and gather experience from previous technology transition that have occured both within the Internet and within related networking technologies. A draft charter was reviewed, with the view that this Working Group work would contribute to the IETF IPng process by identifying these issues and reviewing IPng transition plans at the appropriate phase of the IPng process. TCP and UDP with Big Addresses (TUBA) WG Reported by Peter Ford Chairs Peter Ford Mark Knopper Dave Marlow presented an update on the status of CLNP multicast. His Internet Draft is intended to be multicast routing protocol independent, and was presented from the ES viewpoint. Discussion ensued as to whether the complexity of the network-to-data-link address mapping protocol was worthwhile. The "extra hop" problem is widely viewed as being a show-stopper and Dave presented an approach to address this problem and will be updating the ID to reflect this. Lyman Chapin updated the group on the electronic availability of the pertinent ISO standards. Lyman is now comfortable posting these documents as I-Ds and the network layer protocols (CLNP, IS-IS, ES-IS and IDRP) will all be published by the end of the Seattle IETF. Dino Farinacci gave a short presentation on the status of Protocol Independent Multicasting (PIM) in the IDMR working group. He noted there would be little difficulty in using PIM for multicast routing of CLNP. Ross Callon presented his work on flows in CLNP. In this scheme the source NSEL is used to demultiplex flows between a single host pair. The size of this field (eight bits) was a source of controversy and there was concern that using the Source NSEL might cause to non-TUBA CLNP entitities. Dave Piscitello gave an overview of the current TUBA transition document. Bob Brenner from GTE gave an overview of Cellular Packet Data Network (CDPD). CDPD is using CLNP as an underlying protocol, but it can support mobile hosts that are either CLNP or IP speakers.