Re: [MEXT] the future of the MEXT working group

Hello folks,

For several years now, I have been studying 4G wireless
network architecture and wondering why there is such a
disconnect between, say, LTE mobility management and
IETF mobility management.  Mobile IP has a secondary
role, to say the least.  IETF approaches may be seen to
have several inadequacies, and 3GPP approaches also show
some major problems.  I think that it is important for
the IETF to devote some serious effort towards bringing
these two worlds together, because current directions
are leading towards an impossibly baroque, wasteful,
nearly impenetrable mess of complication.  The effects
overall is loss of performance and opportunity.

Taking a look at S101 and S103, we can immediately
recognize that they are drastically more complicated,
restrictive, and operationally more expensive than
Mobile IP.  Taking a look at S102, we immediately see
that 3GPP mobility management threatens to be different
for each class of application, with an unnecessary
per-application proliferation of servers, protocol,
permissions, traffic controls, configuration, and so on.
Taking a look at recent efforts towards WiFi offload,
we see the same trend of complication and software
hacks that could be avoided with proper IETF
approaches.

On the IETF side, we should specify:
- Integrated authentication for access control
   as well as IP address continuity
- Location-assisted handovers (think MIIS / ANDSF)
- Modular/alternative security
- Signaling on control plane, user traffic on
   data plane
- Alternative tunneling (GTP is simply not going
   to die a quick death, to say the least)
- geez, the list does go on, but no one reads
   long lists ...
...

I don't know if we already have 3GPP liaison, but
if we do the communication channels don't seem to
have had very much effect within the [mext] work
lately.

My fear is that if we don't take action, we are
choosing a future that is ever more complicated,
non-extendible, non-flexible, radio technology
specific, application specific, and bug-ridden.
In short, everything we don't want the Internet
to be.  And, I am sure no one here doubts that
the Internet of the future is all high-speed
wireless.  Where is the IETF going to be?

If the [mext] working group is shut down, there
is no natural place for this work to happen.
Therefore, I hope that [mext] would NOT shut
down, and instead recharter to tackle these
urgent problems.

Regards,
Charlie P.

On 10/28/2011 5:08 AM, Jari Arkko wrote:
> All,
>
> We are making some changes to the working group. While we have
> successfully published a large number of specifications in recent years,
> recently it has been difficult to make progress in the group. The chairs
> and ADs have looked at the situation and we believe we need a new focus
> and a bit of new organization as well. We are terminating the working
> group and moving the one remaining active work item to a new working
> group, the "DMM" working group. Here's what is going to happen:
>
> o Jouni Korhonen and Julien Laganier will become the chairs of the group.
>
> o The group will meet in Taipei (there is a MEXT slot in the agenda).
>
> o The charter of the group will be changed to focus only on the
> distributed mobility effort. We should discuss the details of this
> charter change both on the list and in the meeting. The meeting agenda
> should reserve some time both for technical discussions as well as the
> charter discussion.
>
> o Once the discussion on the list and in the meeting has finished, we
> will rename the group to "DMM" and put the new charter in effect.
>
> o If there are any other specifications that people would like to
> publish beyond the distributed mobility work, we can offer to AD sponsor
> them to RFCs outside the new working group. If there is some significant
> new activity, we can create new working groups for that.
>
> Comments and feedback and/or alternate suggestions on this plan are
> welcome.
>
> We would like to thank Marcelo for your many years of service in MEXT.
> We could not have completed all the work we did without your energy and
> push for high quality results. We would also like to thank Jouni for
> taking on this new challenge, and Julien for continuing the work in this
> space.
>
> Jari and Ralph
>
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