A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Internet Area. The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following description was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg@ietf.org) by October 27th. IP over DVB (ipdvb) ------------------- Current Status: Proposed Working Group Description of Working Group: The MPEG-2 Transport Stream provides a transmission network that has become widely use to support digital TV broadcast, including: DVB, ATSC, ISDB-T. These, and related standards, define a set of commercially available components that are increasingly being used to provide a general-purpose packet transmission network. MPEG-2 Transport networks are being used to build IP networks to supplement broadcast TV/audio services and also provide one-way and two-way IP-only subnetworks. There is a need to define an efficient standardised encapsulation for IPv4 and IPv6 datagrams, and to recommend procedures for supporting protocols. Examples include dynamic address resolution, multicast group membership reporting and possibly management information tables and MIBs. Documents will be defined that describe protocols required to build a complete IPv4/IPv6 unicast/multicast services, and the mappings required to perform dynamic address resolution. The primary purpose of this working group is to develop a set of Internet Drafts and where appropriate to progress these as either Internet Informational RFCs or Standards track RFCs. The current list of work items is: 1. Issue an Internet Draft specifying Requirements and Framework for supporting IP services via MPEG-2 transmission networks. Such requirements should consider the range of platforms currently (or anticipated to be) in use. This draft will be submitted to the IESG for possible publication as an Informational RFC. 2. The working group will investigate and design an efficient encapsulation method for IPv4/IPv6, and advance this via the IESG to a standards-track RFC. The design needs to consider the need for MAC addresses, the potential need for synchronisation between streams, support for IPv6 and multicast services, and support for multiple gateways (feeds). 3. The working group will consider the options for unicast and multicast address resolution. A working group Internet Draft will define a framework and recommend appropriate address resolution mechanisms for IPv4 and IPv6 using both the existing Multi-Protocol Encapsulation and any new encapsulation developed by the working group. Consideration will be paid to existing standards, and the cases for IPv6 and IPv4 will be described. This document will be submitted to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC. 4. A working group Internet Draft will be written to recommend a set of dynamic address resolution procedures for IPv6. It will describe the protocol and syntax of the information exchanged. This work may be based on an extension to the Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol to support MPEG-2 transmission, and include specific optimisations for broadcast networks. This document will be submitted to the IESG for publication as a standards-track RFC. 5. If there is a need for further supporting protocols, it will consider a possible recharter under the guidance of the IESG. Examples in this area include, the negotiation/association of IP QoS with MPEG-2 transport streams, address resolution for IPv4, and the need for SNMP MIBs.
