Subject: Establishment of Temporary Sub-IP Area

From: ad <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 18:16:10 -0500 (EST)

Bounced from Fred Baker
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 17:00:35 -0600
To: [email-masked]
From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Cc: scott_Bradner <[email-masked]>, bert Wijnen <[email-masked]>,
   harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>

The IESG has decided to incorporate the sub-IP working groups, which are
currently chartered in the General Area, into a temporary area. The area
directors will be Scott Bradner and Bert Wijnen. With that change, and
perhaps some jiggling of IESG Technical Advisers, the current working group
charters remain unchanged and represent your work plan.

Long term, the IESG expects to review the process of the development of
this technology and determine whether the IETF needs to further formalize
this area or not. The IESG currently believes that this will not be
necessary; once a strong architecture is in place here, remaining work can
be re-absorbed into other areas such as Operations or Routing. However, we
know all too well that we have been incorrect in the past, and may be
incorrect here.

Part of that discussion will have to be the meta-question of exactly what
the boundaries of the IETF's role are. Clearly, the Internet Engineering
Task Force is interested in the Engineering of the Internet, which we
define as including any network, private or public, metropolitan, local, or
global, which content embedded in an IP packet crosses between two domains.
It includes a discussion of any link or intra-network technology IP uses,
as in the past it has included discussions of Ethernet and extended
Ethernets, occasional and continuous serial links, X.25 networks, Frame
Relay, and ATM. But it does not necessarily include all aspects of those
technologies, or all of their users. Clearly, we need to be prepared to
step in when nobody else is doing a bit of work that the Internet depends
on. Equally clearly, we do not presume expertise in every area, and are
willing to capitalize on work done by other bodies such as ITU-T and IEEE.
This dividing line is fuzzy and needs clarification.

The arguments that bring us to accept sub-IP work in the IETF are
principally that
      · The work depends on IP expertise which is here,
      · That it is critical to the development of the IP infrastructure, and
      · That it directly or indirectly affects operations or routing at the
IP layer.

For example, optical networking is clearly a next generation requirement
for service providers and for fiber consortia. However, the obvious next
hop router in a general network may differ from the obvious next hop router
in an optical network. Therefore, the use of optical networking may change
the results that we need to get from routing protocols. It would be better
for us to determine how the routing protocols should model those networks
than for another body to arbitrarily change them or substitute others.

I trust that you will find your new area directors supportive and helpful
in accomplishing your goals, and expect that you will work with them to
accomplish theirs.