IPng Area Update

[Allison Mankin <[e-mail]>]

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
[e-mail] 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 <[e-mail]>
		Allison Mankin <[e-mail]>


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 <[e-mail]>

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 [e-mail].


Address Lifetime Expectations WG (ALE)

	Reported by Tony Li

	Chairs: Tony Li <[e-mail]>, Frank Solensky  <[e-mail]>


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 <[e-mail]>

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 <[e-mail]>,
		Frank Kastenholz <[e-mail]>

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 <[e-mail]>

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 <[e-mail]>
	        Atul Bansal  <[e-mail]>


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 <[e-mail]>
		Mark Knopper <[e-mail]>

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.