Members of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN) Community and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),
As you know, the AERO and OMNI technologies have been under development for many years within the ATN Working Group I (WG-I) and Mobility Subgroup (MSG) communities, but their technical specifications are now complete and ready for adoption by the IETF. The final products are in the following IETF "Internet Drafts" dated 7/2/2021: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-templin-6man-aero-22.txt https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-templin-6man-omni-33.txt These documents will remain in their current form unless and until they are ADOPTED by the IETF for progression to some form of Requests for Comments (RFC) publication. In the interim, an "Issue Tracker" will be maintained for each document to track any technical and/or editorial errata reported between now and IETF adoption. As you may be aware, there has been an impasse as to how to encourage the IETF to adopt the work with the goal of producing RFCs. The possible avenues for RFC publication include: 1) IETF working group documents In this approach, the document is adopted by a new or existing IETF working group, with the ultimate goal of progressing to a Working Group Last Call (WGLC), an IESG ballot, a resolution of all outstanding issues and finally publication as either Standards Track, Informational or Experimental-category RFC. 2) IESG Area Director (AD) sponsorship The AD Sponsored approach is sometimes taken in which an IETF AD (e.g., Routing Area, Internet Area, etc.) serves as "Document Shepherd" and brings the work forward outside the context of any IETF working group but within scope of their area of responsibility. The document would undergo IESG review the same as for a working group document, again with Standards Track, Informational or Experimental-category as possible outcomes. 3) Independent Submissions through the RFC-ISE Editor The ISE stream allows anyone with work that is relevant to the IETF and of sufficient quality to submit an Internet Draft directly to the RFC-ISE Editor. The work is then progressed toward RFC publication with a note that it is related to the IETF but is not an IETF standard of any kind. In this alternative, only Informational or Experimental documents are possible and Standards Track is not an option. While there have been examples of non-Standards Track works that have been implemented by vendors of widely distributed implementations, this seems to be the exception rather than the normal course of events for ISE stream documents. >From the above alternatives, it should be clear that AERO and OMNI should be >published as Standards-Track if at all possible as either an IETF working group or AD-sponsored product (i.e., options 1 or 2). While publication through option 3) would also attain the desirable end -state of an IETF RFC publication, failure to attain Standards Track could fail to encourage a wide range of network equipment vendors to implement the technologies in their products which could lead to either few or no equipment vendor products to choose from. To date, several overtures have been made to the IETF including publication of a liaison statement requesting IETF action: https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1676/ The AERO/OMNI works were then brought to the attention of the IETF 6man working group where they were largely ignored, including a presentation at IETF110 that drew no comments or discussion. This led the author to conclude that the scope of the work is too broad for the 6man charter; therefore, following finalization of the drafts the works were then offered to the IETF rtgwg and intarea working groups for presentation at IETF111 held last week. At IETF111, a presentation to rtgwg generated substantial discussion on the chat session for which a summary note was posted on the rtgwg mailing list: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rtgwg/oNPr8BA_4esFDXTmY-CbBRhkJ2I/ The IETF111 presentation to intarea generated no discussion, presumably due to the author's attempt to cram 60 mins worth of detailed presentation materials into a 20 min timeslot which may have been better served by a shorter presentation with higher-level bullet points. With all of the above under consideration, the following are now seen as possible ways forward toward RFC publication: 1) Publish AERO as a WG item of the rtgwg working group, while publishing OMNI as a WG item of the intarea working group. 2) Publish one of AERO/OMNI as a WG item, while publishing the other as AD Sponsored. 3) Publish both AERO/OMNI as AD sponsored (i.e., with AERO in the routing area and OMNI in the Internet area) 4) Form a new ATN IETF working group using the [email protected] mailing list for coordination and publish both AERO/OMNI as working documents of this new working group. 5) Publish both AERO and OMNI as RFC ISE stream Informational Category documents. 6) Other Of these alternatives, operating within the context of an existing working group or through AD-sponsorship (options 1-3) would provide the fastest paths toward a Standards-Track publication, while publishing through the RFC ISE stream (option 5) could potentially provide an even faster path but for a lesser publication category. Option 4) (form a new working group) could also be considered, but would likely take multiple years with cooperation needed from a significant number of contributors since first a "Birds of a Feather (BoF)" would first need to be held at an upcoming IETF meeting, followed by selection of working group chairs followed by development and ratification of a working group charter, etc. And, it is not clear that ICAO's deadlines would be met by an approach that could take 3-5 years or even longer to produce a final product. So, the purpose of this message is to both inform the ICAO and IETF communities of possible ways forward toward AERO/OMNI IETF RFC publication and to request interested parties to respond to this message to confirm that some form of IETF action is desired. This is especially true for members of the [email protected] list who are not regular IETF participants. This appeal is being posted also to the IETF working groups as well as wg chairs/ADs where the work might potentially be taken up. In closing, the technical work on AERO and OMNI is now complete. So, if they are indeed wanted by ICAO (and/or any other interest groups) the time for discussion on publication ways forward has come. Please send responses to this list (keeping the To:/Cc:) to express your interest. Sincerely, Fred Templin [email protected] [email protected] _______________________________________________ rtgwg mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rtgwg
