[dcp] draft DCP charter for discussion

[Aaron Falk <[e-mail]>]

All-

Below I've enclosed a draft working group charter for a working group to
develop the DCP protocol. This charter has been agreed to by the Transport
Area Directors, the draft authors, and myself.  However, it's important to
be clear that at this moment DCP is only a BoF, it requires IESG approval
to create a working group.  

To that end we'll be discussing this charter in Salt Lake City.  The IESG
will be looking for indications from the community regarding whether this
work is considered worthwhile and whether there is a critical mass of
interested folks willing to support working group activities (e.g.,
writing, reviewing, implementing, etc). 

Comments on the drafts and charter are encouraged at this time.

--aaron

================================

DRAFT CHARTER: The Datagram Control Protocol (DCP)

The Datagram Control Protocol working group is chartered to develop
and standardize the Datagram Control Protocol (DCP).  DCP is a minimal
general purpose transport-layer protocol providing only two core
functions:

 - the establishment, maintenance and teardown of an unreliable packet
   flow.

 - congestion control of that packet flow.

Within the constraints of providing these core functions, DCP aims
to be a general purpose protocol, minimizing the overhead of packet
header size or end-node processing as much as possible.  Therefore,
DCP is as simple as possible, and as far as reasonably possible,
it should avoid providing higher-level transport functionality.
DCP will provide an congestion-controlled, unreliable packet stream,
without TCP's reliability or in-order delivery semantics.  Additional
unicast, flow-based application functionality can be layered over
DCP.



SCOPE

Drafts for DCP, and several associated congestion control IDs, already
exist.  The first task before the working group will be an abbreviated
functional requirement validation of those drafts.  There are two
possible outcomes: (1) The current DCP draft is declared suitable for
further work, with some areas listed for possible extension.  (2) The
current DCP draft is declared unsuitable for further work, and more
formal functional requirement exploration begins.

Prior to the final development of the protocol, the working group will
investigate areas of functionality that should be integrated into DCP
because they are difficult or impossible to layer above it.  These
areas include security and multi-homing/mobility, at a minimum.

For security, the working group will endeavor to ensure that DCP
incorporates good non-cryptographic mechanisms that make it
resistant to denial-of-service attacks on DCP connections and DCP
servers.  A related topic that will be explored is whether DCP can
be a candidate to replace UDP in the transport of security management
protocols such as IKE and JFK.

The working group will also investigate DCP's relationship with
RTP (the Real-time Transport Protocol).

Once the DCP specification has stabilized, the WG will produce a
document providing guidance to potential users of DCP.  The precise
form of this document will be determined by WG discussion, but it
might include example APIs, an applicability statement, or other forms
of guidance about appropriate usage of DCP.

WORKING GROUP MILESTONES

* Publish summary of required protocol functions/requirements

* Decision to build on proposed DCP protocol, alternate protocol, or
  quit and go home

* Publish DCP protocol as proposed standard

* Publish document providing guidance to users of DCP.

* Publish congestion profiles (as proposed standard) for canonical
  cases of:

  a) one initial window's worth of data

  b) TCP equivalent

  c) TCP Friendly Rate Control



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