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1995-02-22
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IAB Open Meeting
Reported by Abel Weinrib/Intel
An on-line copy of these and other IAB minutes are available from
ftp.isi.edu:pub/IAB.
Not All RFCs are Standard
The open meeting of the Internet Architecture Board at the San Jose IETF
started out with a presentation by Jon Postel on ``Not All RFC are
Standard.'' The issue is that there are a number of grades of RFC
(Informational, Experimental, Proposed/Draft/Standard, Historic) and
people get confused about which do and which do not describe Internet
standards. The status of an RFC is usually clearly stated on the front
page and in the RFC index, this does not help the naive user who does
not have a copy of the document and may incorrectly believe that all
RFCs describe standards. Jon discussed the reasons that a single RFC
series is considered valuable, and then went on to describe the proposed
fix, which is to encourage the use of the STD number rather than the RFC
number when referencing an Internet standard. An advantage of this
practice is that the STD number does not change as the standard goes
through revisions, whereas the RFC(s) describing the standard will
change. User education is an important part of this; in addition, Jon
is in the preliminary stages of using WWW technology to create a
standards directory with hypertext links to the relevant RFCs. The need
for user education was highlighted by the fact that no one in the room
knew what STD 5 is.
Commercialization of the Internet
The second presentation, prepared by Yakov Rekhter and Lixia Zhang and
presented by Lixia, discussed the commercialization of the Internet.
Lixia described the Internet environment of the past, where it is going
now, and made some suggestions about what the IETF should do about it.
Up until recently, the Internet made the transition from a research
testbed to a tool used and depended upon by the research and education
community. Now, the Internet is undergoing a rapid transition to a
public facility open for use by all. The applications, the user
community, and the infrastructure are all becoming commercialized at the
same time. The IETF continues to provide technical solutions to support
Internet development and growth, but the rapid transition is also
raising many non-technical issues that must be addressed (but it is not
yet clear by whom). The technical issues that must be addressed include
better understanding the requirements from commercial users on network
security, network management, accounting and billing and support for
electronic commerce, as well as continuing to make progress on routing
over multi-provider interconnections, introducing support for integrated
services, and so on.
Routing in a Multi-Provider Internet
Yakov Rekhter gave a presentation on ``Routing in a Multi-Provider
Internet.'' He described the current environment as one in which
multiple network service providers are driven by diverse and sometimes
conflicting goals. There is no central control over service providers,
they often compete with each other, and they do not always coordinate
effectively with each other. However, Internet-wide connectivity is
possible only with a degree of cooperation and coordination. Yakov then
went on to discuss routing requirements. Open questions include which
are the most important requirements and who is to bear the cost of
supporting the requirements. Scalability is a critical issue in
routing, with a system that scales linearly with the number of providers
one possibility. The talk ended with some other issues, such as other
routing issues (multicast, mobile hosts) and the impact of a
multi-provider Internet on other areas, such as network management.
There was considerable discussion following Yakov's talk questioning the
desirability of provider-based addressing for IPv6. Other topics
included who ``owns'' the address space, how to financially compensate
the registries so that they can continue to operate (one suggestion was
to charge for queries to the registry rather than for storage of the
information), and the specter of regulation of Internet service
providers.
The Internet Service Model
The final presentation was by Christian Huitema, who asked the question
``The Internet Service Model: should we upgrade it?''. He described
the current model, which provides connectivity (``IP over everything'')
and best effort service with simple gateways and end-to-end controls.
The current challenge is to control the service to support applications
with more stringent real-time requirements, and to control the usage to
avoid the risk of congestion. Proposed solutions include resource
reservation with admission control to provide some form of service
guarantees, fair queueing to isolate the ``bad guys,'' fair policing to
punish the ``bad guys,'' and bandwidth sharing that enforces various
policies. Christian ended his talk by raising a number of issues for
debate, including what the service model should become, what router
requirements should become, and so on.