Subject: (ngtrans) Activities Update

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 20:20:37 -0400

Hi All,

We're about half way between the Minneapolis and Yokohama IETF meetings, so
we thought it would be a good time to update the WG on our current activities and
to get input and feedback.

As we discussed in Minneapolis and on the list, the NGTrans WG needs to do three
things in the coming months:

	(1) Define and describe the most important transition environments.
	(2) Identify the likely transition scenarios for each environment.
	(3) Determine the applicability of our existing transition tools to those
		scenarios, and identify at least one complete set of tools that will 
		facilitate the transition for each defined scenario.

As this work is completed, it should give us a stronger understanding of the applicability
of our current transition tools, and it should also allow us to identify transition scenarios
that are not adequately covered by our existing transition tool set.

In order to carry out this work, the WG chairs are facilitating the formation of several
design teams.  As with all design teams, the work output of these groups does not have
any official standing in the WG, but we do hope that these teams will generate solid
strawman documents that can form the basis of future WG documents.  These teams 
will make their work publicly available at each step, and feedback from the NGTrans WG 
is encouraged.

At this time, we have three teams in various stages of execution:

The "3GPP Transition" team, lead by Jonne Soininen of Nokia, has produced a document 
that defines the 3GPP environment and describes the most likely 3GPP transition scenarios:

	http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-soininen-ngtrans-3gpp-cases-00.txt

This document will also serve as a model for the other teams, who will be encouraged to write
similar documents for their environments.  Please provide feedback on this document.

The 3GPP Transition team is now working on a document that describes how the current 
NGTrans tools will apply in those scenarios.  

We are in the process of forming a team to explore transition scenarios for unmanaged
networks, such as home networks and small offices.  The "Unmanaged Networks Transition"
team will be lead by Christian Huitema of Microsoft.

We are also forming an "ISP Transition" team that will explore the transition scenarios 
faced by ISPs, such as Cable vendors, DSL vendors and dial-up service providers.  This is a 
large area that may be broken into multiple sub-groups once the area is better understood.  
Cleve Mickles of AOL has agreed to lead this effort, which will start with a significant effort
to identify the scope of this area.

It is expected that each of these three teams will have some work available, at least defining
their area and the scope of their problem, by the Yokohama draft cut-off date.  

In the meantime, we encourage authors of documents in progress to describe, either in an 
applicability statement or in a companion document, specific scenarios where their proposal 
fits better than other existing work.  This information will be used by the design teams,
as they work to assemble complete transition plans for the most likely transition scenarios.

The NGTrans co-chairs have also identified a need for a team to explore transition scenarios for
"managed networks" or "enterprise networks".  We've discussed several different ways to capture
these widely varied, complex environments, but we have not yet determined a good method to 
approach this area.  People who have ideas about how to approach a transition plan for managed
networks are encouraged to write an Internet-draft describing the existing deployed environment,
for discussion on the mailing list and in Yokohama.

Thanks,
Margaret (for the NGTrans Chairs)