Establishment of Temporary Sub-IP Area

[Fred Baker <chair@ietf.org>]

The IESG has decided to incorporate the sub-IP working groups, which are 
currently chartered in the General Area, into a temporary area. The area 
directors will be Scott Bradner and Bert Wijnen. With that change, and 
perhaps some jiggling of IESG Technical Advisers, the current working group 
charters remain unchanged and represent your work plan.

Long term, the IESG expects to review the process of the development of 
this technology and determine whether the IETF needs to further formalize 
this area or not. The IESG currently believes that this will not be 
necessary; once a strong architecture is in place here, remaining work can 
be re-absorbed into other areas such as Operations or Routing. However, we 
know all too well that we have been incorrect in the past, and may be 
incorrect here.

Part of that discussion will have to be the meta-question of exactly what 
the boundaries of the IETF's role are. Clearly, the Internet Engineering 
Task Force is interested in the Engineering of the Internet, which we 
define as including any network, private or public, metropolitan, local, or 
global, which content embedded in an IP packet crosses between two domains. 
It includes a discussion of any link or intra-network technology IP uses, 
as in the past it has included discussions of Ethernet and extended 
Ethernets, occasional and continuous serial links, X.25 networks, Frame 
Relay, and ATM. But it does not necessarily include all aspects of those 
technologies, or all of their users. Clearly, we need to be prepared to 
step in when nobody else is doing a bit of work that the Internet depends 
on. Equally clearly, we do not presume expertise in every area, and are 
willing to capitalize on work done by other bodies such as ITU-T and IEEE. 
This dividing line is fuzzy and needs clarification.

The arguments that bring us to accept sub-IP work in the IETF are 
principally that
       · The work depends on IP expertise which is here,
       · That it is critical to the development of the IP infrastructure, and
       · That it directly or indirectly affects operations or routing at 
the IP layer.

For example, optical networking is clearly a next generation requirement 
for service providers and for fiber consortia. However, the obvious next 
hop router in a general network may differ from the obvious next hop router 
in an optical network. Therefore, the use of optical networking may change 
the results that we need to get from routing protocols. It would be better 
for us to determine how the routing protocols should model those networks 
than for another body to arbitrarily change them or substitute others.

I trust that you will find your new area directors supportive and helpful 
in accomplishing your goals, and expect that you will work with them to 
accomplish theirs.