[grobj] BoF in coming IETF 78

[Sheng Jiang <[e-mail]>]

Hi everybody,

We are now intenting to hold a BoF in the coming IETF 78, Maastricht,
Netherlands.

At IETF 76 Hiroshima, we had a BOF on Generic Referral Objects, hosted by
the Applications area. See http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/76/grobj.html.
This BOF showed considerable interest sin the topic but no coherence of
opinion, so it seems that more systematic work is needed on the problem
statement and requirements. Also, it seemed that most of the interest and
knowledge is actually in the Transport area (for the same reasons that
BEHAVE is in the Transport area). 

So, after IETF 76, a problem statement and requirements draft is produced
(http://bgp.potaroo.net/ietf/html/ids/draft-carpenter-grobj-reqts-00.txt).

However, up to now, it is pretty clear that we need a very precise problem
statement to act as the basis. We are working on an individual PS draft,
targeting to submit end of May. Comments on the problem statement aspect of
draft-carpenter-grobj-reqts-00 would become the input for this individual PS
draft. We are going to discuss the referral issues in the mail list to.

The targeting refer WG is first chartered to analyse this problem in detail
and to establish consensus on the requirements for a generic solution.

Best regards,

Sheng

Description of Referral Scenario:

A frequently occurring situation is that one entity A connected to
the Internet (or to some private network using the Internet protocol
suite) needs to inform another entity B how to reach either A itself
or some third-party entity C. This is known as a referral. Originally
this could be achieved simply by passing the relevant IP address
from A to B, but today this is not possible in the general case,
due to existence of disjoint addressing realms caused by NAT or
by IPv4-IPv6 coexistence. In some cases, this problem may be readily
solved by passing a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) instead of an
IP address. Indeed, that is an architecturally preferred solution
according to RFC 1958. However, it is not sufficient in many cases of
dynamic referrals, for a variety of reasons.