Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on our proposed job description.
After reading through the excellent suggestions, your ADs did a more
extensive editing session, resulting in what you see below. Our goal was
to make Nomcom's job (and, of course, the IAB-as-confirming-body's job)
possible, and we tried to distinguish more clearly between
- stuff ADs have to know, and
- stuff ADs have to be able to find someone who knows, and understand
what they're saying about it
We need to provide our description to the just-seated Nomcom (if you'll
be serving on this Nomcom, congratulations, and best wishes) by
something like the morning (CDT) of Thursday, July 18.
We're open to comments until we hand the description over, but if you're
reading this after we've sent it to Nomcom, please let Nomcom know about
your feedback on the job description itself. (You don't have to
convince us, you just have to convince Nomcom :-)
Again, thank you, and if your travel plans include IETF 87, we'll see
you in Berlin.
Spencer and Martin
2013 Transport Expertise
The Transport Area works on mechanisms related to end-to-end data
transport as well as technologies for network storage, content
distribution networks, and peer-to-peer applications. Many transport
protocols support Internet applications and services that exchange
potentially large volumes of traffic at potentially high bandwidths.
A Transport AD should have a broad understanding of core end-to-end
transport topics such as congestion control, congestion signaling and
congestion management, control loops and hysterisis, flow control, and
middleboxes such as NATs and firewalls. Transport ADs are not expected
to be experts on all or even most of these topics, but rather to work
well with the Transport Area participants who are, and to have enough
familiarity with the principles involved to exercise their own good
judgment about what should be done and why.
A Transport AD should have good relationships with the topic experts in
the Transport area, including members of the Transport Area Directorate
and RSVP Directorate, and with topic experts in other areas, and this
requires good soft skills, including the ability to maintain these
directorates.
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).
Together, the two Transport ADs are expected to effectively charter,
manage and review current and new transport work, indcluding congestion
signaling and reporting, QoS and reservation signaling, DiffServ/Intserv
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, unicast and multipath
extensions to existing transport protocols, and congestion control
algorithms for interactive real time media.
The Transport Area intersects most frequently with Internet Area, the
Applications Area, the RAI Area, the Security Area, and
Transport-related IRTF research groups, especially ICCRG. Cross-area
experience in any of those Areas would be particularly useful.
Because many Transport working groups have strong ties to the research
community, some research background can be very helpful.
