Internal WG Review: Access Link Intermediaries Assisting Services (alias)

[iesg-secretary@ietf.org]

A new IETF working group is being considered in the Transport Area.  
The draft charter for this working group is provided below for your review 
and comment.

The IETF Secretariat.

Access Link Intermediaries Assisting Services (alias)
-----------------------------------------------------

Last Modified: 2003-10-24

Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Chair(s): 
Hui-Lan Lu <huilanlu@lucent.com>
Kevin Fall <kfall@eecs.berkeley.edu>

Transport Area Director(s):
Allison Mankin <mankin@psg.com>
Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz>

Transport Area Advisor:
Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz>

Mailing Lists:
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Description of Working Group:
Several types of physical links increasingly used for Internet
connectivity today possess undesirable characteristics, such as high
loss, high delay, and low reliability. Dial-up telephone lines and radio
links in wireless networks (e.g., 3G, GPRS, GSM, IS-95, IEEE 802.11 and
satellite) are examples of such links, whose presence results in
degradation in performance of Internet protocols and services.

Transport intermediaries have been used to mitigate performance
degradation caused by problematic links (see RFC 3135). Such
intermediaries typically reside in nodes (e.g., base stations, or access
points) located at the ends of problematic links. Up to this point,
however, there has been no systematic investigation of the security
implications of the use of transport intermediaries, performance
enhancing or not, and of a common framework for secure transport
intermediary services. The ALIAS working group will fill this void by
first investigating the requirements for standard means for:

+ Transport intermediaries to signal to endpoints their existence and
information (e.g., knowledge of changing link conditions) pertaining to
their services or to usefully influencing the endpoint operation

+ Intermediaries and endpoints to communicate in a secure manner and to
establish security associations
  
If this investigation yields useful requirements that point towards a
feasible solution, the working group will then develop the common
framework and the standard means.
 
While conducting its work, the working group will take into
consideration the related work in other active working groups, including
pilc, ipsec, midcom, opes, nsis and send.
 
Goals and Milestones:

Jan 04    Survey of state-of-the-art to IESG as Informational
Jan 04    Characteristics of services to IESG as Informational
Mar 04    Requirements for intermediary services to IESG as Informational
Mar 04    Analysis of signaling information to IESG as Informational
Jun 04    Evaluate work; recharter or close WG