> There is now a new write-up for the upcoming deliberations of > the NOMCOM, taking the comments received in the IETF-86 area > meeting into > account: > http://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/iesg/trac/wiki/TransportExpertise
For what it is worth... > The Transport Area works on mechanisms related to end-to-end data > transport as well as technologies for network storage and peer-to-peer > applications. Transport protocols support Internet applications and services > that exchange potentially large volumes of traffic at potentially high > bandwidths. I wonder if the first sentence indeed includes CDNI, IPPM, and possibly new AQM work? For instance, what about "The Transport Area works on end-to-end transport protocols, mechanisms related to performance and congestion control, as well as technologies for network storage, content delivery, and peer-to-peer applications" ? > The Transport Area intersects most frequently with Internet Area, the > Applications Area, the RAI Area, the Security Area, and the IRTF ICCRG > research groups. Cross-area expertise in any of those Areas would be > particularly useful. s/IRTF ICCRG research groups/IRTF research groups such as ICCRG/ ? > Current and new transport work includes congestion signaling and > reporting, QoS and reservation signaling, DiffServ? and congestion control > for unresponsive flows, NAT regularization and specification, storage > protocols for the Internet, peer-to-peer streaming, performance metrics for > Internet paths, experimentation with congestion control schemes developed in > the IRTF, multipath extensions to existing transport protocols, and > congestion control algorithms for interactive real time media. Well, TCPM is currently pretty busy with "extensions to existing transport protocols". And not all of them are about congestion signaling or multipath ;) > A Transport AD should have a broad understanding of core end-to-end > transport topics such as congestion control, flow control, real-time > transport protocols, NATs and firewalls, and related topics such as storage > protocols. It is not necessarily important to be an expert in any of these, > as it is much more important to be knowledgable in the principles of these > transport topics, such as congestion control and congestoin management, > Intserv and Diffserv. A Transport AD should have good relationships with the > topic experts in the Transport area and also other areas, which in turn > requires good soft skills. At least TCPM also has to be aware of middleboxes other than NATs and firewalls, including gateways that mess up TCP options, all kinds of load balancers, transparent caches, etc. For instance: s/NATs and firewalls/middleboxes such as NATs and firewalls/ ? I also have the impression that TSV work is often related to operation system design and implementation issues. There is a lot of literature on the principles of congestion control. Unfortunately, there is much less literature that provides insight whether a given RFC can indeed be implemented robustly in a production TCP/IP stack or a real network element... Editorial nit: s/congestoin/congestion/ Michael > Some topics in transport mechanisms have strong ties to the research > community, therefore some research background can be very helpful. > > Together, the two Transport ADs are expected to understand how transport > technologies (layer 4) interact with IP layer technologies and protocols > (layer 3) technologies, and with the end-to-end aspects of various > applications and application-layer protocols (layer 7).
