Subject: WG Review: Provider Provisioned Virtual Private Networks (ppvpn)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 16:31:43 -0500

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the IETF.
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. 

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

Provider Provisioned Virtual Private Networks (ppvpn)
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 Current Status: Proposed Working Group

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 Description of Working Group:
 
This working group is responsible for defining and specifying a
limited number of sets of mechanisms for supporting
provider-provisioned virtual private networks (PPVPNs). The work
effort will include the development of a framework document, a service
requirements document and several individual protocol profile
documents that group a collection of technologies together to specify
a specific type of service offering.  The framework will define the
common components and pieces that are needed to build and deploy a
PPVPN.

The service requirement document will detail the requirements
individual PPVPN profiles must satisfy from a Service Provider (SP)
perspective. Particular attention will be placed on SP requirements
for scalability and manageability considering such factors as Service
Provider's projections for number, complexity, and rate of change of
customer VPNs over the next several years. The working group will make
specific efforts to solicit this information from SPs. The service
requirements document is not intended to define the requirements that
all profiles must satisfy. Rather, it is intended to become a
"checklist" of requirements, not all of which will necessarily be
required in all deployment scenarios. A goal of the requirements
document is to provide a consistent way to evaluate and document how
well each individual profile satisfies the individual requirements.

The effort will produce a small number of profiles that are based on
collections of individual technologies that already exist (see below
for specifics).  The goal is to foster interoperability among
implementations of a specific profile. Note that it is not a goal of
this WG to develop new protocols or extend existing ones. Rather, the
purpose is to document and identify gaps and shortcomings in
individual profiles with regards to the requirements. In the case that
specific work items are identified, such work will be done in an
appropriate WG. Taking on specific protocol work items in this WG will
require rechartering.

The working group is expected to consider (at least) three specific
profiles including BGP-VPNs (RFC 2547), virtual routers and port-based
VPNs (i.e., where the SP provides a Layer 2 network to the customer
such as Frame Relay circuits). Multiple profiles are being developed
as each profile has particular characteristics and appliciblitly
tradeoffs.

The working group will consider inter-AS (SP) VPN interconnects so
that VPNs are able to span multiple ASs (SPs).

Each profile document will include an evaluation of how well it meets
the requirements defined in the requirements document. In addition,
profile documents will address scalability and manageability issues as
well as operational aspects of their approach. Individual profile
documents will also analyze the threat and security aspects of PPVPNs
and include appropriate mandatory-to-implement technologies and
management mechanisms to ensure adequate security and privacy of user
data in a VPN environment.

An applicability statement will be developed for each profile
that describes the environments in which the profiles  are
suitable for deployement.