Application-Layer Traffic Optimization Working Group Charter
The ALTO working group was established in 2008 to devise a request/response protocol to allow a host to benefit from a server that is more cognizant of the network infrastructure than the host is.
The working group has developed an HTTP-based protocol and recent work has reported large-scale deployment of ALTO based solutions supporting applications such as content distribution networks (CDN).
To support current and future deployments of ALTO, the working group is chartered for the following activities:
Provide a place to collect implementation deployment and experience. It is hoped that implementer and deployers of ALTO will report their experiences on the mailing list, and the working group will track implementation and deployment reports on a wiki or in an Internet-Draft.
Perform protocol maintenance for the existing published protocol. It is anticipated that questions and issues will arise concerning the existing protocol specifications: the working group will develop and publish updates as necessary to resolve any problems that are found. The working group will also help resolve any errata reports that are raised.
Develop operational support tools for the ALTO protocol. Based on experience from deployments, the advice in RFC 7971, and considering the latest opinions and techniques from the Operations and Management Area, the working group will develop tools to configure, operate, and manage the ALTO protocol and networks that use ALTO. This may include YANG models and OAM mechanisms. The working group may also update RFC 7971 in the light of new experience and protocol features that were added to ALTO after that RFC was published.
Support for modern transport protocols. When work on ALTO began, the protocol was supported using HTTP version 1. Since then, the IETF has developed HTTP/2 and more recently HTTP/3 that uses the QUIC transport protocol. The working group will develop any necessary protocol extensions and guidance to support the use of ALTO over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.
Security and privacy. The working group will revisit the ALTO architecture and protocol to check that adequate measures for security and privacy exist and can be easily used. This work item might be addressed by discussions and reviews, or might require additional protocol work.
Future use cases. The working group will provide a forum to discuss possible future use case. The objective of this discussion will be to determine a small set of use cases that have strong support and a realistic chance of implementation and deployment. The working group will not develop protocol extensions for these use cases until it has been re-chartered specifically for that purpose.