The charter of the TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm) working group in the Transport Area of the IETF has been updated. For additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the working group 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: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tcpm Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpm/index.html 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 document specifying a way to share the local "User TimeOut" value with the peer such that TCP connections can withstand long periods of disconnection. * The WG is working on an experimental technique to add robustness to TCP against packet reordering having a negative impact on performance. * The WG is coming to grips with how to deal with spoofed segments that can tear down connections, cause data corruption or performance problems. To this end the WG is generating an overview document as well as a scheme that mitigates some of the spoofed segment issues using a challenge-response scheme to reduce the probabilities of a connection being impacted. * The WG is writing an informational document about the ways in which TCPs can handle ICMP "soft errors". * The WG is updating the specification for Explicit Congestion Notification to allow for the use of ECN during part of TCP's three-way handshake to aid performance for short transfers. Milestones: Apr 06 Submit NCR Reordering Mitigation draft to the IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC. Apr 06 Submit ECN-SYN document to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC. May 06 Submit overview of spoofing attacks against TCP to IESG for publication as an Informational RFC. May 06 Submit In-Window Attack draft to IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC. May 06 Submit User TimeOut option document to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC. May 06 Submit soft errors document to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC. _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
