Subject: Document Action: 'Architectural Guidelines for Multipath TCP Development' to Informational RFC (draft-ietf-mptcp-architecture-05.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:41:55 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Architectural Guidelines for Multipath TCP Development'
  (draft-ietf-mptcp-architecture-05.txt) as an Informational RFC

This document is the product of the Multipath TCP Working Group.

The IESG contact person is Lars Eggert.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mptcp-architecture/

Technical Summary

  Hosts are often connected by multiple paths, but TCP restricts
  communications to a single path per transport connection.  Resource usage within
  the network would be more efficient were these multiple paths able to be used
  concurrently.  This should enhance user experience through improved resilience
  to network failure and higher throughput.

  This document outlines architectural
  guidelines for the development of a Multipath Transport Protocol, with
  references to how these architectural components come together in the
  development of a Multipath TCP protocol.  This document lists certain high level
  design decisions that provide foundations for the design of the MPTCP protocol,
  based upon these architectural requirements.

Working Group Summary

  This is a product of the MPTCP WG. There is a consensus in
  the WG for publication as an informational RFC. 

  There is a very solid WG
  consensus behind the document. It captures the key high-level design decisions
  about the MPTCP protocol, which have been reached after extensive discussion and
  agreement at the IETF meetings and on the list.

Document Quality

  There is already an implementation of the protocol (draft-ietf-
  mptcp-multiaddressed) that implements the architecture and high-level design
  decisions in this document, https://scm.info.ucl.ac.be/trac/mptcp/wiki. 

  There were five detailed reviews of versions of the document. No substantial
  issues were raised. Expert reviews (MIB doctor etc) were not applicable.

Personnel

  Philip Eardley ([email-masked]) is the Document Shepherd.
  Lars Eggert ([email-masked]) reviewed the document for the IESG.