Brian,
1/ The IRTF sounds like a good landing point for all the previous
attempts to get the IETF to add path-awareness protocols.
BTW, this goes back a lot further than SPUD. A good summary of pre-2007
efforts in this space is in a section of Pasi's draft on this from 2007:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sarolahti-tsvwg-crosslayer-01#section-6
, which reminds us of TRIGTRAN (2002), INTERSEC (2003), ALIAS (2003) and
TERNLI (2006).
[I wrote this before seeing Lars's email pointing to TERNLI]
2/ The advantages of opacity (invisibility) of path characteristics
should also be in scope.
In general the tone of the text seems to be "awareness = good;
unawareness = bad". If I have detected this tone correctly, it would
represent an implicit value judgement; which would not be a good
starting point for research.
* You've alluded to potential security advantages in the phrase
"exploration of trust and risk models".
* There are also evolvability advantages. I recall David Clark (I think)
saying that the rudimentary interface between transport and network was
a feature not a bug. Admittedly it's a pain for the transport to have to
discover available path capacity, path delay, etc. However, the
alternative would have been to require all L2 technologies to be able to
give information that would require them to make assumptions about the
transport. That in turn would ossify transports and L2 technologies.
We might be saying that the Internet is moving into a new phase where
performance is now more important than evolvability. That's a point to
debate, but I know you, at least, still believe that stack evolution
will remain important.
Bob
On 12/07/17 07:21, Brian Trammell (IETF) wrote:
Greetings, all,
We'll be having a first meeting of the proposed Path Aware Networking (PAN) RG
at IETF 99 in Prague next week, 13:30 Wednesday in Congress Hall 3. Since
bringing path awareness to the endpoint has been the focus, at least in part,
of a couple of running TSV working groups (MPTCP, TAPS), this RG seems to be of
general interest to the transport area. Olivier Bonaventure will give a review
and overview of research to date in this space, and Adrian Perrig will present
a fully path-aware Internet architecture, as an illustration of what is
possible when path-awareness is promoted to a first-order goal.
From our proposed charter (https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/panrg/about):
The Internet architecture assumes a division between the end-to-end
functionality of the transport layer and the properties of the path between the
endpoints. The path is assumed to be invisible, homogeneous, singular, with
dynamics solely determined by the connectivity of the endpoints and the Internet
control plane. Endpoints have very little information about the paths over which
their traffic is carried, and no control at all beyond the destination address.
Increased diversity in access networks, and ubiquitous mobile connectivity, have
made this architecture's assumptions about paths less tenable. Multipath
protocols taking advantage of this mobile connectivity begin to show us a way
forward, though: if endpoints cannot control the path, at least they can
determine the properties of the path by choosing among paths available to them.
This research group aims to support research in bringing path awareness to
transport and application layer protocols, and to bring research in this space
to the attention of the Internet engineering and protocol design community.
The scope of work within the RG includes, but is not strictly limited to:
- communication and discovery of information about the properties of a path on
local networks and in internetworks, exploration of trust and risk models
associated with this information, and algorithms for path selection at
endpoints based on this information.
- algorithms for making transport-layer scheduling decisions based on
information about path properties.
- algorithms for reconciling path selection at endpoints with widely deployed
routing protocols and network operations best practices.
The research group's scope overlaps with existing IETF and IRTF efforts, and
will collaborate with groups chartered to work on multipath transport protocols
(MPTCP, QUIC, TSVWG), congestion control in multiply-connected environments
(ICCRG), and alternate routing architectures (e.g. LISP), and is related to
the questions raised in the multiple recent BoF sessions that have addressed
path awareness and multiply-connected networks (e.g. SPUD, PLUS, BANANA).
he PAN(P)RG intends to meet at each IETF meeting until a
determination is made whether or not to charter it. Afterward, the RG intends to
meet at 1-3 IETF meetings per year, and hold one workshop per year, colocated
with a related academic conference.
--
________________________________________________________________
Bob Briscoe http://bobbriscoe.net/
