A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Transport 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 February 4th.
TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)
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Current Status: Proposed Working Group
Description:
TCP is currently the Internet's predominant transport protocol.
To maintain TCP's utility the IETF has regularly updated both
the protocol itself and the congestion control algorithms
implemented by the protocol that are crucial for the stability
of the Internet. These changes reflect our evolving
understanding of transport protocols, congestion control and new
needs presented by an ever-changing network. The TCPM WG will
provide a venue within the IETF to work on these issues. The WG
will serve several purposes:
* The WG will mostly focus on maintenance issues (e.g., bug
fixes) and modest changes to the protocol and algorithms
that maintain TCP's utility.
* The WG will be a venue for moving current TCP specifications
along the standards track (as community energy is available
for such efforts).
* The WG will write a document that outlines "what is TCP".
This document will be a roadmap of sorts to the various TCP
specifications in the RFC series.
TCPM will take a subset of the work which has been conducted in
the Transport Area WG over the past several years.
Specifically, some of the WG's initial work will be moved from
the Transport Area WG (tsvwg).
TCPM is expected to be the working group within the IETF to
handle TCP changes. Proposals for additional TCP work items
should be brought up within the working group. While
fundamental changes to TCP or its congestion control algorithms
(e.g., departure from loss-based congestion control) should be
brought through TCPM, it is expected that such large changes
will ultimately be handled by the Transport Area WG (tsvwg).
All additional work items for TCPM will, naturally, require the
approval of the Transport Services Area Area Directors and the
IESG.
TCP's congestion control algorithms are the model followed by
alternate transports (e.g., SCTP and (in some cases) DCCP). In
addition, the IETF has recently worked on several documents
about algorithms that are specified for multiple protocols
(e.g., TCP and SCTP) in the same document. Which WG shepherds
such documents in the future will determined on a case-by-case
basis. In any case, the TCPM WG will remain in close contact
with other relevant WGs working on these protocols to ensure
openness and stringent review from all angles.
