Subject: WG Review: RSVP Admission Policy (rap) - RECHARTER

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 13:24:46 -0400

A revised charter for the RSVP Admission Policy (rap) IETF working
group has been submittted. The IESG has not made any determination as
yet. 

The following Description was submitted, and is provided for
informational purposes only:

Recent work in the IETF has led to the development of standards for a
QoS-enabled Internet. Through the efforts of the Integrated Services
working group, data flows can describe their desired or required service
to the network. RSVP carries the service requests into the network, where
the acceptance of these QoS requests results in better network service to
some flows, possibly at the expense of service to traditional best-effort
flows. 

In an open and public Internet (as well as large intranets), maintaining
such service differentiation inherently depends on mechanisms capable of
enforcing (or reporting) operational policy constraints. Towards this end,
RSVP message formats contain a place-holder for policy data0 elements,
which may contain information relevant to the network's decision to grant
a reservation request.

Certain network elements may require assistance in the processing of these
policy-data elements and, therefore, may communicate with one or more
policy servers, entities which specialize in the making of policy
decisions.

The purpose of the IPC working group is to establish a scalable policy
control model for RSVP. The working group will specify a protocol for use
among RSVP-capable network nodes and policy servers. This work will also
require documentation of any extensions to RSVP which may be necessary in
support of this policy control.

In addition, the working group will define usage directives for use of the
COPS base protocol to support policy information exchange transactions
within the framework being standardized in the Policy Framework Working
Group. In particular, the group will address the following work items: 

1. COPS usage for policy provisioning transactions ("COPS Usage"): The
working group will produce a standards-track RFC that specifies usage of
COPS for the support of policy information exchange transactions between a
PDP and its PEPs. 

2. Object syntax for carrying policy provisioning information ("Object
Syntax"): The working group will produce a standards track RFC that
specifies the syntax of objects and their contents for carrying policy
information. The working group will specifically focus on the syntax of
objects needed for carrying information related to QoS policy
provisioning. 
 
This work explicitly excludes definition of semantics of policy
provisioning objects. Instead, it will rely on the definitions from the
relevant working groups such as DiffServ and ISSLL. 

Documents produced by the working group must fully address all the
security aspects of this type of protocol. In particular, theft and denial
of service threats must be minimized.

In pursuit of these goals, the working group must expressly avoid
specifying policy behavior. The judgment of specific policies is similarly
beyond the scope of the working group. The working group will, however,
specify mechanisms that allow for a wide variety of possible policies to
be carried out.