Internet Standards/CD1.mdf/INET/IETF/94MAR/COMPEN.MIN

Text File | 1994-05-13 | 6.7 KB | 174 lines

Compression Encapsulation over IP BOF (COMPEN)

Reported by Rodney Thayer/Sable Technology


Summary

Twenty-three people attended the COMPEN BOF in Seattle.  It was
generally agreed that there are situations where people have a need for
encapsulation, such as compression.  It was the rough consensus of the
group that if a working group is formed, it should address the general
issue of encapsulation over IP. There was some discussion of whether or
not encapsulation over IP is a problem that is already being solved by
PPP, and whether PPP provides solutions to encapsulation problems.  It
was established that there is enough interest to form a working group on
Generic Encapsulation Over IP, and the COMPEN mailing list will be used
to work together to modify the existing draft charter to reflect the
proposed working group's goals.


Presentations and Discussion

One compression encapsulation scheme was presented by Matt Lukens (see
slides following the minutes:  Figures 1 and 2) and discussed by the
group.  The group also discussed more general requirements for
encapsulation.  Bob Enger (a user, in this context) brought up several
requirements and provided some additional pictures (see slides:  Figure
3).  Several common points were identified:


   o Encapsulation of compressed data over IP is the right place to do
     this---it is essentially a routing issue.

   o Other groups have addressed the encapsulation problem in several
     different circumstances, that is, encapsulation is something that
     needs standardization.  cisco has authored an informational
     description of their Generic Router Encapsulation protocol; there
     is a scheme for encapsulating IPX; and others are wrestling with
     this issue.

   o There is an interest in encapsulators being interoperable.


Charter for Proposed Working Group

The chairs of the proposed COMPEN Working Group will be Rodney Thayer
and Matt Lukens.  The group will be chartered in the Internet Area.

Mailing lists already exist for the group.  The general discussion list
is [e-mail].  To subscribe to the list, send a request to
[e-mail].  The archive of the list will be located
on ftp.std.com:/pub/compen-archive.

The following group description was written before the BOF was held:


     The Compressed Encapsulation over IP Working Group (COMPEN) is
     chartered to develop a protocol to be used to transmit
     compressed data over IP. The current state of compression
     technology has allowed the development of devices which provide
     the capability to compress IP data.  This working group is
     intended to produce a document which describes a standard
     envelopment protocol that can be used to allow a pair of
     devices to exchanged compressed IP packets.  It is the intent
     of the working group to provide a standard protocol that will
     allow different implementations of compression over IP (of
     which several are now in existence) to interoperate.  There
     also is the need for the capability to support more than one
     compression algorithm, and to support other encapsulation
     schemes, such as encryption, when used in combination with
     compression.

     The group wants to provide a standard protocol for use in
     compressing IP data to solve the problem of allowing
     interoperability among devices that support compression.  The
     intent is to solve this interoperability problem by
     establishing a common protocol.  Currently, in order to
     transmit compressed IP over the Internet, the same vendor's
     equipment must be used on both ends.

     The development of a standard encapsulation protocol is
     important to the Internet community because the current state
     of the technology allows individual implementations to exist
     that do not interoperate with each other, and yet these
     implementations are present side-by-side in the Internet.  For
     example, several parties are using Internet protocol type 99 to
     represent compressed data using different encapsulation
     schemes.

     The development of a protocol for compression over IP is not
     inconsistent with other uses of compression, such as within
     modem standards or link-level protocols such as PPP. This is
     because there are situations where users wish to interconnect
     two nodes through an internetwork and they do not have control
     of all intervening links, and therefore they have to transmit
     IP across the internetwork to connect the two nodes.


The following goals and milestones were identified before the BOF
session:


March 94    Meet as a BOF and draft a charter for consideration as an
            IETF working group.  Submit the charter to the area
            directors.

June 94     Release a document as an Internet-Draft

July 94     Present the Internet-Draft at the IETF meeting.  Revise and
            edit the document as needed.

Aug 94      Re-release the Internet-Draft.

Nov 94      Submit the Internet-Draft to the IESG for publication as an
            RFC.


Compression Encapsulation Requirements

An outline of compression encapsulation requirements follows the minutes
(Slide 4).


Proposed Working Group Requirements

It was the rough consensus of the attendees that the group requirements
be modified to the following outline:


   o General tunneling, not just compression

   o Specifically address:
      -  Compression
      -  Encryption
      -  No data alteration, just protocol, such as CLNP, Mobile IP,
         Appletalk, etc.
      -  Dynamic negotiation
      -  Fragmentation and expansion
      -  Tunnel re-establishment

   o Address whether this is ``different'' from PPP over TCP (or
     something else)

   o Address whether this is different from GRE


Attendees

Larry Blunk              [e-mail]
Caralyn Brown            [e-mail]
David Conrad             [e-mail]
Ian Duncan               [e-mail]
Robert Enger             [e-mail]
Shoji Fukutomi           [e-mail]
John Houlker             [e-mail]
Jim Hughes               [e-mail]
Jan-Olof Jemnemo         [e-mail]
Akira Kato               [e-mail]
David Kaufman            [e-mail]
Sun-Kwan Kimn            [e-mail]
Ted Kuo                  [e-mail]
Joshua Littlefield       [e-mail]
Matt Lukens              [e-mail]
Gary Malkin              [e-mail]
Gerry Meyer              [e-mail]
William Miskovetz        [e-mail]
Brad Parker              [e-mail]
Doug Schremp             [e-mail]
Oscar Strohacker         [e-mail]
Rodney Thayer            [e-mail]
Walter Wimer             [e-mail]