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DRAFT TRANSCRIPT

SIG:           Policy
Date:          Thursday 2 March 2006
Time:          9.00am

Presentation:  IAB report
Presenter:     Leslie Daigle
			       
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KENNY HUANG:

Now we go to the first presentation presented by Leslie from chair 
of IAB.

LESLIE DAIGLE:

Good morning and thank you.

So what I'd like to do this morning is to give a bit of an overview
of the IAB and IETF themselves so you have some context for what's
going on here and I'll also give a bit of an update of current work
going on there that you might find of interest, particularly relevant
to the, you know, to this meeting and/or the rest of your technical
activities.

So first of all, there is the IETF, which is a formal organisation
in and of itself for defining technical standards. But often when
one refers to 'the IETF' one is actually talking about a group of
organisations that actually work together to take care of all the
work that goes into creating and publishing and maintaining those
standards. So I like to think of this as being a universe, a universe
in constant motion and, at any given point, there is input being
brought by technical individuals participating with their own
expertise and not as representatives of organisations that contribute
to working groups and other activities within the IETF.

So, in terms of internal organisations, there is the IETF, which
is directed by the Internet Engineering Steering Group, which
organises the working groups and you can see that in the upper part
of the picture there. That's the bulk of the work of engineering
specification. And then there is the IAB, which has some responsibility
for big-picture architecture and that is the group of which I am
currently chair. So there is a close coordination between these two
groups, obviously. The other component on the picture that I want
to point out about the IAB - we also formally organise the Internet
Research Task Force, which is another component of the overall
picture of taking care of everything from research to engineering
with some kind of an architectural overview.

The output of the IETF is recording request for comment, formal
publications, RFCs and those are managed by the RFC editor and the
technical protocol parameters associated with IETF specifications
are recorded at the IANA.

So just a quick note about the IETF itself. Again, I said that it
is composed of engineers from all over the world. Most of the work
is done by e-mail and formally all participation is actually done
by e-mail so you're certainly welcome, if you're not already
participating, to engage in a particular working group or technical
discussion and you will be a full and honest member of the IETF,
participant in the IETF. Apart from that, the IETF does meet three
times a year and typically we meet variously across the world,
sometimes in Asia, sometimes in Europe and sometimes in North
America. All the documents are published and publicly available and
I've given two links for places for you to find more information.
These slides are in the proceedings from this so you can certainly
pull them down at your leisure.

So just to give you a sense of the span of work that the IETF does,
there are currently seven areas loosely organised around the different
levels of the protocol stack from applications to Internet and
routing. There are other, sort of, cross-areas like security and
then the IETF general area for various policy-related - IETF
policy-related - working groups.

In March 2006 - well, in about three weeks - there will officially
be a new area in the IETF for realtime applications in infrastructure.
This is taking over a lot of the Voice over IP and media-related
work that was split between the applications area and the transport
area and bringing it all into a new area to manage its focus.

So just a little bit more about the IAB itself. Again, some hopefully
useful pointers - all of our meetings are minuted and you can see
the minutes of past meetings at that rather long URL (refers to
slide). And we keep track of all the documents that we publish
ourselves as well as the documents that we're working on and we
always welcome comments on our Internet drafts.

I wanted to draw your attention to the technical focus that the IAB
has had for the last year - a year running from March to March
because that's more or less the cycle of appointees to the IAB and
IESG and what not. So this year our three areas of focus have been
IPv6, Internet architecture, surprisingly enough, and unwanted
traffic.

The Internet architecture focus, really, is just a question of
trying to find ways and means of bringing useful discussion around
Internet architecture as a whole. It's very easy in the IETF or the
world to focus on piece problems that need to be solved and at
times, local optimisation may be at odds with global optimisation.
That's true in architecture as much as anything else. So for instance
one of the things that we've done is establish a general architecture
discussion list which is - I think it's architecture-discuss@IETF.org
and you're welcome to subscribe and see the ongoing raging debates
there.

IPv6 may not be an obvious current topic in some regards but since
the IETF party line is that IPv6 is the way to go - but one of the
important things to recognise is that there are still open questions
and issues beyond - there's still engineering and technical issues
to resolve in order to have a smooth and ongoing deployment. I'm
sure that's not news to you.

So the kinds of things that the IAB is doing in these areas. We
have a couple of ad hoc committees. An IAB ad hoc committee is a
group that's formed by invitation of the IAB. We bring together
various experts in a given topic. It's used in some sense to inform
the discussions of the IAB. The committees themselves have no
authority and no decision-making but they are a convenient organisation
of people to discuss particular topics.

So for instance the IPv6 ad hoc that I've mentioned here includes
various people that you would be familiar with, including Geoff
Huston, who, as part of the discussions out of this ad hoc group
has put out a couple of Internet drafts that are going to RFC that
are of interest to this area. One is a document about IPv6 special
addresses, essentially what are the - how do you go about getting
address allocation for specific experiments, etc, within the IETF.
So that's attempting essentially to wrap some kind of a definition
around what was a fairly grey area in IANA allocations of IPv6 space
and trying to say, "Look, you know, these are the cases where
legitimately it is for a technical experiment and is not at odds
with the right and proper business of RIR functioning." There was
also a document considering the HD-ratio itself. The HD-ratio came
out of some technical discussions within the IETF and is documented
there. The technical work of analysing it, etc, still goes on within
the IETF and that can only inform the policy discussions that take
place within the RIRs. So that's sort of an example of how the IETF
and RIRs can and should play well together because there is sort
of some joint responsibility here and so the IETF, for instance,
does not in any way set policy but we hope to be able to pursue the
technical activities that will help inform some of the policy
choices.


So I wanted also to mention that there is - on the IPv6 front, there
is a multihoming BoF which is happening right now two doors down.
And I apologise in advance - I'll be disappearing there just as
soon as I finish giving you this update. It was originally scheduled
at a different time but got moved to this morning so my apologies
for the confusion there.

OK, so, generally speaking, in terms of IETF interest, as I mentioned,
IPv6 - the main work is finished but there are lots of different
pieces that still need to be ironed out in order to make this
successful and useful in the large. Also looking at mobility and a
lot of work on signalling and quality of service and traffic
engineering going on. I've listed some of the work that's going on
there. All of these pieces coming together will play in building
the future successful Internet and evolving the network to a
future-generation network.

Always interesting work going on in the security area. There is
never enough security. We never feel secure. These are a few of the
actual efforts that are current in the IETF if you want to track
them down and get involved or see what is going on specifically in
the working groups. The "Better than Nothing" security is one that
I'm particularly fond of because it's in essence an attempt to look
at - "Well, look, given that full-on security infrastructures are
often difficult to ensure mathematically, deploy pragmatically,
etc, what can we do that will be better than having no security at
all?" So it's kind of a pragmatic look of where can we go with
security. Continuing work on AAA and, sure, I think that's enough
about that.

Right, so, there is lots and lots of work going on in the IETF and
it is rarely dull so here's some more of the fun that we're getting
ourselves into (refers to slide). As I mentioned earlier, the
realtime applications and infrastructure area is spinning up. Here
is an example of some of the work that has been ongoing in the IETF
but will now be organised under the RAI area - so all the AV stuff,
instant messaging, Voice over IP as well as some of the geolocation
and emergency preparedness work which is necessary to communications.

And that's it. Are there any questions?

PAUL WILSON:

Thanks very much for the presentation and also for being here. Does
the IETF have a view or a position on NGNs that you could share
with us?

LESLIE DAIGLE:

How much longer do we have?

PAUL WILSON:

As much time as you like.

LESLIE DAIGLE:

You probably caught my oblique reference to that, to essentially
an evolving network. I believe - the IETF being a collection of
individuals, it is almost impossible to get an official view, stance,
etc, except as what is published in RFCs, but I think it's worth
pointing out there was a joint IETF/ITU workshop almost a year ago
in May in Geneva where we sort of explored our view of the evolving
network and the ITU's view of the evolving network, and our stance
was fairly consistently that these are the base protocols and
technologies upon which any future network is going to be based and
the important thing is to evolve network technologies as opposed
to leaping to a Next Generation. So some of the particular technologies
that are important are exactly quality of service and signalling -
what are the tools that network providers can use to build the
services that they wish to offer going forward.

OK. Thank you.

KENNY HUANG:

OK, thank you very much, Leslie.

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