ERCIM News is the magazine of ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics). In a recent number, Future Internet Technology, there is an interesting article about the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its activities.
The following lines are a summary; you can read the whole article here or download the complete issue.
What is the Internet Engineering Task Force?
The Internet Engineering Task Force was the birthplace of today’s Internet. Created in 1986 by US government agencies (DoD, Department of Energy, NASA, NSF) to supervise the design and deployment of Internet protocols, it was initially open only to US government-funded researchers. In 2008, IETF meetings were attended by roughly 1300 engineers and researchers from all over the world.
The IETF is an Research and Development (R&D) forum in which network engineers define, describe, review and discuss network protocols, which are published as Requests For Comments (RFC). These then may or may not be implemented and used by industry. IETF meetings are triannual, with business in the interim being conducted on open mailing lists.
Organizational Structure of the IETF
Work within the IETF is organized into working groups (WGs), each of which is in charge of a specific problem (e.g. mobile ad hoc routing). WGs within the same general field are assembled in a so-called “area” (e.g. the routing area). In early 2009, the IETF had eight areas and 120 working groups.
The assembly of area directors forms the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). The IESG, together with the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), ensures the overall coherence of the Internet protocols “corpus”.
Rather than voting (as in the IEEE or ETSI), decisions in the IETF are made based on “rough consensus“.
The Pertinence of the IETF
The ability of an R&D forum to meet the positive evolution of a technology depends on how it manages the four following parameters: vision, legacy, luck and necessity.
Vision: while IETF’s vision is fuzzy, since initiatives generally come from the bottom, its top-level directions are very clear. Currently, for instance: mobility, scalability to encompass the Internet of objects, or IPv6. Introduced in the 1990s to address the scarcity of available addresses with IPv4 (four bytes format), IPv6 upgrades IP to a flexible address management scheme over 16 bytes.
Legacy: the most brilliant idea in the world may be presented in vain if it is incompatible with existing technology. Nevertheless, there is a parallel forum called the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), where new paradigms (e.g. delay-tolerant networking) are trained to fit legacy.
Luck: the most important issue in an R&D forum is the ability to manage an unexpected breakthrough. A striking example is TCP, created by the IETF in the late 1980s, to cope with brutal capacity reduction when data traffic had to cross long-haul networks. With TCP, a source terminal tunes the file transmission pace according to feedback from the destination terminal. Experts consider the strength of TCP to be the main reason for the success of the Internet.
Necessity: the IETF mandates itself to solve certain problems. For example in the late 1980s, the current routing protocol RIP failed when a set of routers was brutally removed from the network. This bug, called ‘count to infinity’, created a sustained loop that caused an avalanche of disruptions: the Internet was down for two full days. Created for replace RIP, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), widely used nowadays, is far more robust, based on an exhaustive mapping of network links that allows routers to compute new routes and react in real time to disruptive topology changes.
Link: http://www.ietf.org
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