WG Action: RECHARTER: Behavior Engineering for Hindrance Avoidance (behave)

The charter of the Behavior Engineering for Hindrance Avoidance (behave)
working group in the Transport Area of the IETF has been updated. For
additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the working 
group Chairs.

+++

Behavior Engineering for Hindrance Avoidance (behave)
=====================================================

Current Status: Active Working Group

Chair(s):
J Kuthan <jiri@iptel.org> 
Cullen Jennings <fluffy@cisco.com> 

Transport Area Director(s):
Allison Mankin <mankin@psg.com> 
Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz> 

Transport Area Advisor:
Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz> 

Mailing Lists:
General Discussion: ietf-behave@list.sipfoundry.org
To Subscribe: ietf-behave-request@list.sipfoundry.org
In Body: with subscribe in body
Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/ietf-behave

Description of Working Group:

Given the current near-universal deployment of NATs (Network Address
Translators) in the public Internet, the lack of standards for NAT behavior
has given rise to a crisis. While it is widely acknowledged that NATs create
problems for numerous Internet applications, our inability to describe
precisely what a NAT is or how it behaves leaves us few solutions for
compensating for the presence of NATs.

The behavior of NATs varies dramatically from one implementation to another.
As a result it is very difficult for applications to predict or discover the
behavior of these devices. Predicting and/or discovering the behavior of
NATs is important for designing application protocols and NAT traversal
techniques that work reliably in existing networks. This situation is
especially problematic for end-to-end interactive applications such as
multiuser games and interactive multimedia.

NATs continue to proliferate and have seen an increasing rate of deployment.
IPv6 deployments can eliminate this problem, but there is a significant
interim period in which applications will need to work both in IPv4 NAT
environments and with the IPv6 to IPv4 transition mechanisms.

This working group proposes to generate requirements documents and best
current practices to enable NATs to function in as deterministic a fashion
as possible. It will consider what is broken by these devices and document
approaches for characterizing and testing them. The NAT behavior practices
will be application independent.

The group will also advise on how to develop applications that discover and
reliably function in environments with NATs that follow the best current
practices identified by this working group. This will include the
development of protocol-independent toolkits usable by application protocols
for NAT traversal. This will include a revision of RFC 3489 for NAT binding
discovery and a relay protocol that focuses on security.

The work will be done with the goal of encouraging eventual migration to
IPv6 and compliance with the UNSAF [RFC 3424] considerations. It will not
encourage the proliferation of NATs.

The behavior that will be considered includes IP fragmentation and
parameters that impact ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP, MLD, and multicast. The
proposed WG will coordinate with v6ops, midcom and nsis. The work is largely
limited to examining various approaches that are already in use today and
providing suggestions about which ones are likely to work best in the
internet architecture.

Goals and Milestones:

Dec 2005: Submit BCP that defines unicast UDP behavioral requirements for
NATs to IESG

May 2006: Submit revision of RFC 3489 to IESG

May 2006: Submit relay protocol to IESG

Jul 2006: Submit a BCP that defines TCP behavioral requirements for NATs to
IESG

Dec 2006: Submit a BCP that discusses protocol design techniques for using
the existing set of NAT traversal approaches to IESG

Jan 2007: Close WG or recharter

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