Subject: Document Action: 'Services provided by IETF transport protocols and congestion control mechanisms' to Informational RFC (draft-ietf-taps-transports-14.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2016 08:00:27 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Services provided by IETF transport protocols and congestion control
   mechanisms'
  (draft-ietf-taps-transports-14.txt) as Informational RFC

This document is the product of the Transport Services Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Mirja Kühlewind and Spencer Dawkins.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-taps-transports/

Technical Summary

This document describes, surveys, classifies and compares the protocol
mechanisms provided by existing IETF protocols, as background for
determining a common set of transport services.  Protocols addressed
include TCP, SCTP, UDP, UDP-Lite, DCCP, ICMP, RTP, FLUTE/ALC, NORM,
TLS, DTLS, and HTTP when used as a pseudotransport.  It captures
important analysis needed for the TAPS working group goal of
developing an abstract API enabling applications to make use of modern
transports with the help of TAPS mechanisms, for example to probe and
verify end-to-end protocol transparency.  This is a useful first step
by the TAPS working group to proposing future abstractions and
mechanisms.

Working Group Summary

All the protocols referenced in this document are products of the
IETF.  The goal here is to introduce consisten terminology and pull
together a common view of a number of well-known protocols.  The
working group struggled early on in finding the right level of
abstraction but was able to achieve consensus on the approach
contained in the doc.  Each protocol section had one or two active
authors who are experts in their section and went through multiple
revisions.  The result is that about a dozen contributors have
provided text so the engagement was high, compared to the active
mailing list members.  A few objections have been raised about whether
the overall effort will be useful but the contents of this draft have
not been controversial.  The working group held a last call that
spanned an IETF meeting with a number of cleanup tasks identified.
Some new introductory text and restructuring on the doc was introduced
and a second, online last call, produced no comments.  It is the
opinion of the shepherd that the document is ready for publication.

Document Quality

The document looks fine (to the AD). This is a survey of existing
transport protocols, so the usual questions about implementations,
etc. don't apply in this case.

Personnel

The document shepherd is Aaron Falk. The responsible Area Director is
Spencer Dawkins.