[IRTF-Announce] April 2005 IRTF Report

IRTF Chair report

  Transition

The transition from outgoing to incoming IRTF chairs is pretty much
complete.  The IRTF website and a few mailing lists have been moved
from ICIR to ISI.  I'm working on a slight redesign of the website.
I'm having get-to-know-you phone conferences with many of the RG
chairs (especially the ones who don't go to IETF).

  Resources

The secretariat has indicated that they have insufficient resources to
host IRTF mailing lists, so I'm considering moving the irtf.org
mailing lists to ISI so that this does become not an impediment to new
work.  This highlights the issue of resources for the IRTF, which have
not been directly addressed by the IASA activities, AFAICT.  Near term
resource issues are obtaining rooms at IETF meetings and the IT
support.  Some initial discussions with the IAB and IETF chairs are
underway.

  New Work

Several research topics have been suggested for new IRTF activities.
Many of these have no further description and I plan to followup with
the instigators to at least get a few paragraphs of explanation.

    - congestion control research group
    - overlay networks, I3 networks
    - designing protocols to survive tussle
    - enroll --  ad-hoc authorization bindings
    - interactions between congestion control and ID/locator split
    - distributed hash tables
    - privacy: comprehensively, through the stack
    - future of indirection & rendezvous, i.e. time for a DNS
      follow-on?

I'm scheduling a call together with Mark Handley to discuss the status
of the Congestion Control Research Group proposed charter.  My
understanding is the last thing that happened was review by the
Transport Area Directors and some requested changes.  There appears to
be a lot of interest behind this effort.

  Attracting participation

Expanding the IRTF will require more participation.  This will be more
important as the proposals for new IRTF activities start to come from
the IAB rather than the researchers themselves.  These proposals need
to be cast in language that is appealing to researchers (which may be
different than the natural way for folks familiar with the IETF to
describe them), so it is clear there are interesting problems in
scope.  Also, to draw in participants it will be necessary to
publicize the new efforts.  Finally, there needs to be some reward for
participating in IRTF collaborative efforts, specifically RG consensus
RFCs.  (The lack of peer-review for RFCs reduces their standing in the
academic world.)

  Here are some proposals under consideration:

   - Conduct peer review on some IRTF documents.  Peer-reviewed IRTF
     documents would have enhanced standing in the academic world,
     although this could take some time.

   - Add an IRTF imprimatur (or brand) to some documents.  This would
     allow them to more easily be distinguished from RFCs which were
     from individuals.

   - Create an IRTF publication track in an academic journal.  The
     editor of ACM CCR has expressed interest in this approach.

   - Create a workshop to highlight areas which need attention.  There
     are many variations which might be tried here: single topic
     workshops, workshops on only new/proposed topics, or workshops in
     which all the existing research groups have some participation.

  Reporting

Publicizing the work of the IRTF is part of raising awareness of the
activities there.  We are planning to forward status reports to the
(new) irtf-announce mail list and possibly post them on the website,
once the update is complete.

I am also discussing with the RG chairs the best way to report RG
progress and issues.  There is general unhappiness with submitting
monthly reports as this too frequent for the level of activity in the
groups.  Some ideas under discussion include more substantive reports
on a less frequent basis (quarterly, per-IETF, annually).  Should this
happen the RG reports for the IAB minutes would diminish although
exceptional issues would still be reported as they come up.

**************************************************************

RESEARCH GROUP REPORTS

**************************************************************
* Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG)
**************************************************************

It's been a quiet couple of months.  The IRR subgroup finally got a
draft of the reputation scheme that was presented at IETF 61.  The
abuse reporting subgroup seems poised to converge on a draft written
by ex-co-chair Yakov Shafranovich.

The main ASRG list continues to serve its function where people drop
in, tell us about their wonderful new spam solution, and we inevitably
break the bad news that it's not new and it's known not to work.

**************************************************************
* Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG)
**************************************************************

no report

**************************************************************
* Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group (DTNRG)
**************************************************************

no report

**************************************************************
* End-to-End Research Group (E2ERG)
**************************************************************

no report

**************************************************************
* Host Identity Payload Research Group (HIPRG)
**************************************************************

The main event in the RG was changing a co-chair, as Pekka Nikander
has resigned due to new IAB duties. The following research related
activities were discussed on the RG mailing list.

  - a new version of Ericsson HIP code release is available and test
    server installed by them. The test server supports IPv4 and v6 and
    has its HIT in DNS AAAA entries.

  - Telecom Italia performed comparative testing of three existing HIP
    implementations. The draft report has been discussed among
    implementors.

  - There was an announcement from Denmark that they have 3 students
    looking at HIP

  - Work on legacy NAT traversal is commencing (by hiring a student to
    do it over summer).  Additionally, a paper on HIP NAT registration
    by Tschofenig et al.  accepted at ACISP'05
    http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/gurtov/papers/midbox.pdf

  - A workshop on HIP is proposed in Daghstul, Germany by Eggert et al
    in 2006.

**************************************************************
* Internet Measurement Research Group (IMRG)
**************************************************************

IMRG has been attempting to determine if there is further work to do
within the confines of the RG or whether the RG should be closed.
Several ideas have been presented and we're currently attempting to
gauge the energy level behind these ideas.

**************************************************************
* Mobility Optimization Research Group (MOBOPTS)
**************************************************************

There was no activity on the RG alias.  However, there is discussion
about the RG in a related IETF WG MIPSHOP.

  - one of the RG documents "Bootstrapping a Handover Key from SEND"
    is being considered as a document of interest to the MIPSHOP WG.

  - there is discussion of a topic on conveying link characteristics
    from a Mobile Node to its correspondent using Mobility
    signaling. While this signaling appears feasible, the implications
    (e.g., end-to-end transport behavior) are not well
    understood. This might become a topic of interest to the RG.

**************************************************************
* Network Management Research Group (NMRG)
**************************************************************

Below is the report for the NMRG. Something that is not visible in the
report is that several NMRG folks have jointly written EU project
proposals to fund more management related work. I have no idea whether
we are going to be successful but I thought you might want to know
that activities such as these are resulting from the NMRG effort, even
though they are not publicly visible.

NMRG report for March 2005:

  - Discussion continued on VoIP management issues. The next NMRG
    workshop will be held before the IETF in Paris. The meeting will
    be hosted by the network management research group at INRIA in
    Nancy.

  - Only little little progress has been made so far to condense the
    various arguments exchanged on the mailing list related to VoIP
    management into a document.

NMRG report for April 2005:

  - Some people involved in the NMRG will attend the ITU/IETF meeting
    in Geneva since ITU's NGN initiative is strongly related to one of
    our current interests.

  - Work towards a management traffic analysis slowly progresses. IUB
    has reported work on anonymization to the NMRG for discussion and
    feedback.

**************************************************************
* Peer-to-Peer Research Group (P2PRG)
**************************************************************

We had a semi-NO-OP with respect to activity for March and April:

  o The group has responded to several requests for pointers to papers
    on various P2P research topics

  o We are now in the planning stage for a RG meeting in Paris the
    first week of August at the IETF meeting in Paris.

**************************************************************
* Routing Research Group (RRG)
**************************************************************

The RG mailing list has been broken for at least several weeks.  No
luck resurrecting the list yet.  I am trying to get the list of
subscribers from the old list holder.  Not having much luck with that
either.  Will try once more and then will create a new list on
ietf.org and put out a call.

The RG has pretty low energy.  Things do go on in the background, but
not on a monthly reporting scale - maybe will have things to report on
a 3 monthly scale.

Also, just got a offer of some work on a RRG draft on:

> It occurs to me that over the last decade or so while we've been
> having conversations about routing technology, we've managed to
> create a significant bit of legacy in terminology and thought.
> Unfortunately, not all of it is implemented yet so there's a finite
> risk that after a few of us leave the industry/job
> market/interactive domain, some of that knowledge would be lost.
>
> I'd like to propose to contribute an RFC that simply documents and
> codifies the terminology and thinking that we have had to this
> point.

One of the closed group on algorithms is working but on a slower,
research sort of, pace - though its list is quiet as well.  So, am now
trying to think through one more push to get this group revitalized.

_______________________________________________
IRTF-Announce mailing list
IRTF-Announce@irtf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/irtf-announce