A new IETF working group has been formed in the Transport Area. For additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the WG Chairs. TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm) ------------------------------------------ Current Status: Active Working Group Chair(s): Ted Faber <faber@isi.edu> Mark Allman <mallman@icir.org> Transport Area Director(s): Allison Mankin <mankin@psg.com> Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz> Transport Area Advisor: Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz> Mailing Lists: General Discussion: tcpm@ietf.org To Subscribe: tcpm-request@ietf.org In Body: subscribe email_address Archive: ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/tcpm/ Description of Working Group: 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. Specific Goals: * A revision of RFC 1323 based on experience and evaluation. Depending on the conclusions of the WG and the nature of the updates this document could be a candidate for Draft Standard. A current Internet-Draft has been submitted to start this process (draft-jacobson-tsvwg-1323bis-00.txt). * A "roadmap" for TCP. The protocol and associated algorithms have become spread out throughout the RFC series. This WG will issue a document that catalogs all the various TCP specifications and informational documents in the RFC series in a single location. An initial discussion (and strawman start at a list of such RFCs) has been conducted on the end2end interest list. * While there is no consensus on exactly how to deal with spurious retransmits (caused by bad RTO estimates or packet reordering) there are several proposals that will be fleshed out in this WG and likely issued as experimental documents. The current set of proposals is: draft-sarolahti-tsvwg-tcp-frto-03.txt draft-blanton-tcp-reordering-00.txt draft-bhandarkar-tcp-dcr-00.txt Goals and Milestones: Mar 04 Submit FRTO draft to IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC Mar 04 Submit Reordering Mitigation draft to IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC May 04 Submit DCR draft to IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC May 04 Submit TCP Roadmap document to IESG for publication as a Best Current Practices RFC May 04 Develop (providing editors are available) milestones for advancement to Draft Standard of identified important TCP specs (e.g. RFC 2018, 2581, 2988...) Jun 04 Submit a revision of RFC 1323 to the IESG for publication as a Proposed or Draft Standard (depending on the nature of the changes to the document)
