In this post I’ll highlight some of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) groups meeting during the IETF 99 meeting in Prague next week. These groups are working to explore and address more sophisticated ways to use and share available bandwidth, improve Internet performance, and otherwise efficiently get Internet content to where it needs to be.
Monday afternoon in Prague will be the second BoF meeting for BANdwidth Aggregation for interNet Access (banana). This BoF will discuss methods to take advantage of multiple access links, provided by one or more access providers, in cases where end nodes and applications may not be multi-access aware. Use of multiple access links could provide bandwidth aggregation when multiple links are available (i.e. improved performance), and session continuation when a link becomes unavailable (i.e. increased reliability).
The tsvwg WG has many documents under discussion on topics including diffserv, ECN, and UDP options. The WG has two meetings on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
The mptcp WG will be meeting on Tuesday and Friday afternoons to discuss the latest developments and proposed improvements to the Multipath TCP protocol. MPTCP support in iOS11 was announced during WWDC2017.
One of the most active new IETF WGs is QUIC. QUIC is a UDP-based transport protocol that provides multiplexed streams over an encrypted transport. QUIC aims to be nearly equivalent to an independent TCP connection, but with much reduced latency and better stream multiplexing support. The quic WG is meeting on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning in Prague.
Measurement techniques and data sources that could help us to make better engineering decisions to work around some of the rigidity in the protocol stack will be the subject of the Measurement and Analysis for Protocols (maprg) research group meeting on Thursday morning.
Packet networks give rise to transient congestion by design and several groups are meeting to discuss different aspects of congestion control and avoidance. The Internet Congestion Control research group (iccrg) will meet on Monday afternoon to discuss some of the latest innovations and thinking in relation to congestion control and managing congestion on the Internet. The meeting will include an update on TCP Prague ideas and an update on the BBR congestion control algorithm from Google including experiences with deployment at YouTube. Modifications to the functioning of TCP are proposed, presented and discussed in the tcpm WG which will meet on Monday morning in Prague. Internet metrics are defined by the ippm WG and they are meeting in Prague on Wednesday morning.
And last but not least, the tsvarea open meeting will take place on Monday afternoon.
Related Working Groups and BoFs at IETF 99
banana (BANdwidth Aggregation for interNet Access) BoF
Monday, 17 July 2017, 1550-1720, Grand Hilton Ballroom
Draft
Charter
maprg (Measurement and Analysis for Protocols) RG
Thursday, 20 July 2017, 0930-1200, Congress Hall II
Charter
iccrg (Internet Congestion Control) RG
Monday, 17 July 2017, 1330-1530, Congress Hall III
Charter
quic (QUIC) WG
Thursday, 20 July 2017, 1550-1750, Grand Hilton Ballroom
Friday, 21 July 2017, 0930-1130, Grand Hilton Ballroom
Documents
Charter
tcpm (TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions) WG
Monday, 17 July 2017, 0930-1200, Karlin I/II
Documents
Charter
mptcp (Multipath TCP) WG
Tuesday, 18 July 2017, 1550-1750, Athens/Barcelona
Friday, 21 July 2017, 1150-1320, Congress Hall I
Documents
Charter
ippm (IP Performance Metrics) WG
Wednesday, 19 July 2017, 0930-1200, Athens/Barcelona
Documents
Charter
tsvarea (Transport Area Open Meeting)
Monday, 17 July 2017, 1740-1840, Grand Hilton Ballroom
tsvwg (Transport Area Working Group)
Tuesday, 18 July 2017, 1330-1530, Congress Hall I
Thursday, 20 July 2017, 1810-1910, Congress Hall III
Documents
Charter