A modified charter has been submitted for the Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (capwap) working group in the Operations and Management Area of the IETF. 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. Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (capwap) ----------------------------------------------------------- Current Status: Active Working Group Description: The original CAPWAP WG charter included drafting a problem statement and a taxonomy of architectures. The new charter of the CAPWAP WG proposes building upon the original charter and developing a CAPWAP protocol to provide interoperability among WLAN backend architectures. The intent of the CAPWAP protocol is to facilitate control, management and provisioning of WLAN Termination Points (WTPs) specifying the services, functions and resources relating to 802.11 WLAN Termination Points in order to allow for interoperable implementations of WTPs and ACs. The revised CAPWAP WG will reference two classes of the Centralized WLAN Architecture family, namely the Local MAC and the Split MAC, as described in the CAPWAP Architecture Taxonomy draft. The protocol will define the CAPWAP control plane including the primitives to control data access. An effective Centralized CAPWAP Architecture impacts how WLAN data traffic is managed over the backend network. This implies the abilitiy to control how data is forwarded by negotiating existng data encapsulation mechanisms and specifying data payload formats in order to ensure interoperability between CAPWAP vendors. No other specifications of the CAPWAP data plane are within the scope of this charter. The CAPWAP WG will strive for extensibility in the protocol design to favor future applicability to other access technologies, especially IEEE 802.16. While accommodation of any access technology other than IEEE 802.11 is not required for successful completion, there are clear deployment advantages if a wide range of access technologies are accommodated. In summary, the primary goals of the group will be: 1. Defining a set of Objectives based on the architecture taxonomy work that lists the requirements for an interoperable CAPWAP protocol. In addition, the WG will incorporate requirements derived from the inputs provided by Enterprise and (hotspot) Providers based on the WLAN deployment challenges addressed by CAPWAP architecture. This document will: a. include objectives to address problems described in the CAPWAP Problem statement document b. Describe each objective, its benefit to the protocol and how it satisfies the problem statement. c. Prioritize and classify the objectives into 3 categories: i. Mandatory and Accepted ii. Desirable iii. Rejected d. Undergo review in IEEE 802 as needed This should result in the first WG Last Call for Objectives draft. To avoid requirements bloat and stalemate, the WG has a hard deadline on the Objectives phase. The WG MUST reach WG consensus on the objectives draft by Feb 2005. This is for several reasons: * We must send this for review to IEEE at that time. * We must have a reasonably stable set of objectives so that candidate submissions are aware of the objectives to be met. The 2nd WG Last Call (in April) for the objectives draft is to ensure that the WG has consensus on any changes that may result from IEEE and expert review. So it is not the intention that the WG keeps adding new Objectives after Feb 2005. If the WG cannot reach consensus on the Objectives draft by the May 2005 milestone to the IESG, the WG will close. 2. Evaluating a set of candidate proposals that include existing IETF protocols and any proposals leading to the selection of a protocol on which to base the CAPWAP standard. 3. Developing a CAPWAP protocol standard that meets the Mandatory and Accepted objectives from the Evaluation draft and contains the minimal set of feature needed to control and provision WLAN Access Points. Specifically The CAPWAP protocol document will address the following considerations: a. Architecture b. Operations c. Security d. Network Management e. Scalability f. Performance 4. A MIB Document to support the CAPWAP protocol. In addition, the CAPWAP WG will maintain its Liaison with the IEEE to ensure consistency of its work with the IEEE 802.11 Standard. Deliverables: * Objectives/Criteria Document for CAPWAP protocol * Protocol evaluation and base protocol selection document * CAPWAP Protocol standard * MIB support standard _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
