Subject: [IRTF-Announce] TMRG Report

From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:39:01 -0700

Transport Modeling Research Group Report
August 2006

The TMRG has unfortunately been in a low-energy state since last
fall.  Accomplishments of the TMRG in the last four months include
modest revisions of the two basic internet-drafts on metrics and
tools for the evaluation of congestion control mechanisms.  A group
of people have volunteered to contribute a major section on modeling
wireless networks for the tools draft.  There has also been significant
work over the summer on the development of an internet-draft on
best-current-practice scenarios for the evaluation of congestion
control mechanisms, led by Yong Xia in Beijing, but this has not
yet been sent to the mailing list.

Current work items include the following:
(1) advancing the internet-draft on metrics to an Informational RFC;
(2) adding several major new sections to the internet-draft on tools.
(3) submission and group review of the in-progress document on
best current scenarios.

Future plans will include further development of best current
practice scenarios for the evaluation of congestion control mechanisms
in simulators and testbeds.  After this is accomplished, the research
group could either disband, or could address scenarios for the
evaluation of other aspects of transport protocols (security,
mobility, etc.).

The TMRG web page:
http://www.icir.org/tmrg/

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From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:39:01 -0700

The TMRG web page:

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From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:42:11 -0700

Internet Congestion Control Research Group Report
August 2006

Accomplishments:
------------------
ICCRG has carried out a series of discussions in the past about
issues such as the definition of congestion and the next steps
to be taken. Finding agreement "on which technologies are
viable long-term solutions for the Internet", as specified in the
charter, turns out to be a difficult task (but we haven't yet given
this up).

Current work items:
--------------------
We are now working on a survey of congestion control related
RFCs (and perhaps also Internet-drafts which are WG items)
which are *not* TCP specifications. This document will complement
the TCP Roadmap of the IETF TCPM WG. The goal is to educate
the reader about congestion control related viewpoints of the IETF
as well as related mechanisms that have been specified or documented.
A developer of a new congestion control mechanism can use this
document as a source for design guidance, for learning about the
state of the art and for learning about mechanisms in the Internet
that should be taken into account by the new scheme.

Additionally, we are building a "congestion control bibliography" -
a collection of links to congestion control overviews in the ICCRG
Wiki page. This will serve as input for the document that is mentioned
under "future plans".

Future plans:
-------------
We will write a document that was originally planned as an overview
of congestion control efforts in the research community, but may
turn into something else. There seems to be agreement that classifying
existing mechanisms would be the most important aspect of such an
overview, and that the intention is not to simply provide a long list,
but to find a way to learn from the efforts of colleagues. One way
to achieve this is to sketch the spectrum of types of feedback that
can be used, from implicit to explicit, from coarse to fine granularity;
it might even be possible that such an approach would show gaps
in the spectrum that have not yet been filled, thereby making the
document more than a mere survey of the state of the art. At this
point, we only have a vague idea of this document.

Another future plan is to hold a meeting. Internally, it has been  
discussed
to co-locate it with the Pfldnet workshop in February 2007, but the
group has not yet been involved in this decision because we want to
have final dates before discussing them.

URL:
------
http://www1.tools.ietf.org/group/irtf/trac/wiki/ICCRG

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From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:43:57 -0700

Anti-Spam Research Group Report
August 2006

The ASRG has been extremely quiet in the last few months.  That's  
most likely because the DKIM WG has roughly the same constituency as  
ASRG so people have been busy there.  DKIM has thrown off a few  
questions that should be interesting research topics such as how one  
might create useful categories of messages that I'll try to bring up  
once DKIM quiets down.

The one item in ASRG was a proposal to develop a taxonomy of spam  
types, which the chair endorsed so long as it didn't degenerate into  
yet another debate about what is or is not spam.

We have an Internet draft languishing in not-quite-published land due  
to a shortage of reviews from other group chairs.

http://www.irtf.org/asrg

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From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 10:39:15 -0700

Network Management Research Group Report
July and August 2006

NMRG report July 2006:

[1] A two hour meeting was held during the 66th IETF (Monday). The
     meeting focussed on work underway to collect SNMP traffic traces
     from several operational networks and to analyze these traces in
     order to find out (a) how SNMP technology is being used in
     operational networks and (b) what typical pattern of management
     operations are. Several tools, intermediate data formats, and
     anonymization functions have been developed to support the
     cooperation between the parties involved in this effort.

[2] It has been proposed to be organize a workshop to identify network
     management research challenges and to draft a kind of a research
     agenda in this area for the next ~5 years. This workshop will be
     organized jointly with EMANICS (a EU funded project on the
     Management of Internet Technologies and Complex Services) and
     will be collocated with the IEEE/IFIP International Week on
     Management of Networks and Services (MANWEEK) in October in
     Dublin, Ireland.

NMRG report August 2006:

[1] The organization of a workshop to identify network management
     research challenges and to draft a kind of a research agenda in
     this area for the next ~5 years has made progress. The workshop
     will take be hold on 19-20 October 2006 in Utrecht (Netherlands)
     and will be hosted by SURFnet (the Dutch research network
     operator). A call for participation has been circulated and the
     organizers are working to make sure that a balanced mixture of
     people with different backgrounds will be present.

[2] Additional network management traffic traces have been collected /
     made available. Work on analysis tools is ongoing and papers are
     being prepared with initial analysis results. The Internet-Draft
     which describes the approach and data exchange formats used is
     being updated as needed.

The URL for the workshop is:
http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/nmrg/meetings/2006/utrecht/

The URL for the NMRG is:
http://www.irtf.org/nmrg