Jenny Bui
Ignacio Castro
Stephen Farrell
Liz Flynn
Kurtis Heimerl
Dirk Kutscher
Dave Oran
Colin Perkins
Alvaro Retana
Rodney Van Meter
Lixia Zhang
Colin mentions that he has a small number of AOB at the end, but nothing major.
The minutes of the August 27, 2024 telechat have been approved.
Colin mentions that he needs to review the document, and also asks that other people to also review it.
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Colin mentions that draft-fluhrer-lms-more-parm-sets done and was updated yesterday. Mallory confirmed it addressed her comments, so this will be going to final poll anytime now. The rest are waiting for reviews and have been waiting for a reasonable amount of time. Colin asks Jenny to send a reminder.
Jenny responds that she will send it.
Dave adds that Colin said the reviewers are assigned for each of these? We're not looking for reviewers?
Colin responds that we have reviewers assigned to all of them.
Colin mentions that draft-irtf-iccrg-rledbat is ready for IRSG review, and is planning to ask Mirja to review. As for draft-irtf-cfrg-opaque, Colin has sent his reviews and saw that the authors have responded to his comments so possible changes to come to address the comments.
Colin starts by saying that we have been discussing the IRTF Code of Conduct for a while now. We have issued the IRTF-wide Last Call just after the Vancouver meeting. The Last Call was completed about a week or so ago, and Colin has submitted a revision this past weekend with some minor clarifications to address the feedback received. Colin thinks this is done now. The process that was agreed upon, was that at the end of Last Call, the IRSG would discuss to see if they agree that it's done, so if, we will issue an IRSG ballots, and are looking for yes or no objections from at least two-thirds of the IRSG. Colin then asks the group if they think there is sufficient support to proceed or is there changes needed?
Dave responds that he thinks it looks ready to him.
Colin asks if anyone else read it or have any objections to proceeding with the poll on this? Colin then responds that he will confirm by email and then plan to start the final poll on this document probably later this week. The plan is to get it approved before the Dublin meeting.
Colin mentions that he has made significant revisions based on the feedback that was received partly by email, and partly in this meeting last month. Colin then asks if the new version is closer to being on the right track and is there any more feedback or anything people want to suggest for this document? The open issues seem to be mostly around NDAs and exactly what constitutes a conflict of interest.
Dirk responds that he looked at it, and doesn't have anything to add at the moment.
Stephen asks, does this require us to kind of make an annual type of declaration of some sort?
Colin responds that he doesn't think of an annual disclosure. He thinks it says to make a disclosure when your situation changes although Colin thinks it would be helpful if we get the Secretariat to send reminders every so often and annually probably makes sense.
Stephen adds that the suggestion is just before dotting the eyes and saying it's all done, just try and run the process and see, does it cause an issue for anybody that they can't figure out what to do.
Colin says that makes sense. We're not planning on publishing this as an RFC anyway so we can just adopt it and change it if need be.
Colin starts by saying that this is another document that was discussed last month, and he has now revised the document based on the feedback that people have sent. There's a couple of minor revisions that happened since last month. Colin also has some minor comments to incorporate as well, but thinks this one is generally in good shape. Colin's impression is that people were broadly comfortable with the way it's going, so he proposes that we highlight this during the IRTF open meeting in Dublin to make sure we get some chances for broader community feedback and then think about issuing last call and publishing it as an RFC on the IRTF stream. Colin then asks if that seems reasonable to everyone?
Colin starts by saying that he shared a couple of proposed research charters with the IRSG yesterday, and there's been a bunch of discussion about creating two new research groups.
The space research group is looking at extending IETF protocols, primarily for lower orbits and maybe reaching out to the moon but also considering deep space missions. A lot of this seems to be on just understanding what the issues are and whether the bundle protocol and the DTN work still makes sense or whether we should be extending protocols like QUIC for those environments.
The other one is sustainability research group, looking into environmental impacts of the internet. Colin mentions that the green working group was just formed in the IETF which looks more into metrics for energy usage and carbon for carbon intensity. Colin wanted to raise awareness that we are discussing those groups and partly if people have any feedback on either the specifics of the charters or whether these things are conceptually sensible things to be charterting.
Dave asked who are the people proposing the sustainability charter?
Colin responded it's Ali Rezaki and Eve Schooler.
Dave says he knows Eve but doesn't know about Ali one way or the other, so it would be nice if somehow understand the level of confidence that they have the ability to involve the right people.
Colin agrees that is fair.
Dirk chimes in and says probably some time commitment would be good because he thinks it could take quite some effort to set it up correctly and make it interesting for the IRTF.
Colin says Ali seemed pretty keen when he spoke to him, so Colin thinks he is wiling to put in the time.
Dave asked Dirk if Ali is coming to Dagstuhl next week (Dagstuhl seminar 24402)?
Dirk responded that he doesn't think so.
Dave says the output from Dagstuhl could help inform this.
Dirk responded and said they invited Eve but she couldn't make it at the end.
Dave adds that we might make a note to at least bring this up briefly in Dagstuhl. This is being discussed and who might be interested being involved. Start forming a community.
Colin thinks that would be a good idea if there's a meeting happening anytime now. Colin thinks Ali is in Europe so it might be possible to get him to call in briefly.
Dirk says this whole Green Networking topic will be crucial to identify the actual research topics because it's a bit like a corporate responsibility activity and promotion activity. He would be really careful to make sure that we have really good research topics that would actually be addressed in the group.
Colin says that his concern is that the charter is quite broad and seems to be trying to do lots of things.
Ignacio adds that his feedback after reading the draft is that it's very clear that they want green and sustainable things, but it's not very clear what that precisely means. Where the boundary ends and how it overlaps with other groups is going to be worked out. Ignacio says his feedback for Sustain is that maybe the charter needs to be more clearly defined and milestones and goals to be a bit more clear.
As for the Space, Ignaco said the topic is very clearly defined, but he understand though this is not his area and that there are other forums where this thing is being discussed so maybe elucidating how they're going to interact with those would be something useful.
Colin responds that he thinks it mentions CCSDS, but we should be certainly clear.
Rodney asks on the Space one, this draft charter is on Erik Kline's Github. Who besides Erik is involved? And what's the relationship between this and the ISOC IPNSIG?
Colin responds that Erik was the one who was leading writing this, so that's why he's involved, but doesn't know what's the relationship with ISOC.
Stephen adds that he thinks it's a pretty confused situation, so waiting until the Dublin IETF before thinking more about it will probably makes sense. Since there is the DTN working group in the IETF that's working away in the Bundle protocol, there's a BoF with the idea of using QUIC for things for which people would like to use the Bundle protocol, in some sort of unwisely competitive mode. And his understanding of this proposed research is that it's also thinking more about lower orbit constellations and last space link, and Stephen thinks that's where Eric's interest lies.
Colin adds that it's a bit more broader than that because he was pushing them to sort of restrict it cislunar rather than more broadly and they were pushing back against that so they do want to go a little further than just lower orbit.
Stephen says that he thinks Eric is part of Aalyria, the spin out from Google and the ballon people and so that's kind of much more near earth and with constellations. There's an issue that a whole bunch of people who want to do routing or something between the satellites and the constellation will just do their secret sauce. But there may also be some research issues as to how do you interact with such a network. It's unclear to Stephen if there's enough niche there for a research group pr not, and there might be but differentiating that versus DTN working group and the possible outcome of this deep space QUIC BoF, will be tricky in probably all cases, but it might be doable.
Alvaro chimes in and says that he is chairing that deep space with Lars, and that's one of the things that they're looking at. What's the overlap with space research, not only which part of space are we looking at, is it not traditional near earth networks? Are we looking at the moon, or we're looking beyond the moon. All that stuff, but also what about technologies? The IPs, the protocols, and all those things. Alvaro then adds that he tends to initially agrees with Stephen that maybe we want to wait to see what happens with the BoF because trying to coordinate the research group charter and the potential working group charter and DTN which may be in the process of rechartering. There's been some rechartering talk in TVR as well, and that creates a bunch of stuff. So maybe we want to wait a little bit there, but we have already been talking about how do we get all these charters harmonized in a way that really makes sense and we're not overlapping each other, and not stepping on each other's toes.
Dave says, he hasn't looked at the agenda for both, but in general BoFs are oriented towards discussions about what might be ready for standardization and probably there won't be any discussion as to what research might be needed in order to inform whether it's ready for standardization. Dave wonders if there's a way to keep these things separate?
Alvaro responds that's what we want to do. The agenda is basically use cases for some people who think they need standardization now and then we're going to discuss the charter. It's a very straightforward agenda. They just started really working on it this week, so they haven't looked at the slides and the specific use cases and everything else, but that's the plan. To constrain in the BoF, what are the specific use cases and specific things that would need standardization. Where there is an interest and there's people who are going to participate, all these good things.
Dave asks the folks who are proposing this don't believe there are blocking research issues that would lead one to not be ready to standardize stuff now?
Alvaro responds, correct, that is what they think. Lars and Alvaro just started working this, this week so they haven't looked at all the materials. And yes, there's a possibility that there are questions or that there are other things that they think they know, but they really don't know. So Lars and Alvaro are going to try to focus on what they know, they may also mean that whatever is in the charter right now. There's a strong emphasis from some of the components on QUIC, e.g. It maybe that some of these things may go away. We maybe want to focus a charter on specific things that are now, but again, they started this week and have been looking at it for less than a day.
Dirk thinks it's an interesting topic and when he read this, it looks really broad so he agrees to what Stephen said before. Dirk also thinks there's a bit of a risk here that this would turn into a forum activity, where you discuss applicability of different protocols, some measurements reports here and there. He's not sure what the success rate has been with research groups like this, so it's not like really an identifiable research agenda and that's maybe a bit of concern.
Colin agrees that it's certainly a risk and he really does want to understand how it relates to deep space BoF before proceeding with both of these. Colin thinks the Sustain one has a clearer distinction from Green, but for both of them Colin wants it to be clear how they differ from IETF work.
Lixia agrees that Dirk regarding the scope of the proposed research group. She thinks the title is overly broad, calling it the Space Research Group, but looking at the proposed charter, it mostly focused on the performance and the transport issues. Lixia is part of those LEO research communities now. The two fundamental problems that's yet to fund the proper consensus regarding the direction or routing and the security. Lixia posted a pointer to a recent paper about this Leo security issue when people talked about directly connecting cellphones to the Leo networking was just published this year. Lixia is not objecting to creating a research group, at the minimum, the research group name needs to reflect the limited scope of the proposed charter. There's not a space in general; it's very focused on transport and performance as far as she can tell.
Colin thinks that the scope is sort of intentionally focused there. We have people who own satellite constellations who are willing to talk sensibly about routing and without knowing the details of how these things really work. Colin isn't convinced we can offer anything new in the routing space, whereas, some transport things we can do over the top experiments and make transport protocols that work without the operators getting involved.
Lixia thinks that's very true, although, in our own little play, we learned that transport is tied to routing dynamics and like Colin mentioned is still a puzzle. Lixia suggests that the proposed research group title is inappropriate.
Colin thinks that makes sense.
Dirk adds that that's a general concern in this field so that in the research that we see on LEO Networks, and so on. Most people want to try to measure something with space access network and reengineer something without actually knowing how it works and they will also not get this information. It's maybe fair research but it will not bring this field forward necessarily which he notices in many publications recently.
Lixia says she kind of recalls people asking this question, but has forgotten the answer. Who are the people proposing this Space research group?
Colin responds that Erik Kline who's the one mostly leading it.
Stephen says that he thinks there's an issue related to the kind of scenarios that people want to explore in the DTN working group, the bundle protocol, that deep space BoF, and this is possibly space research group which is that even if you're going to use different kind of network stacks or different protocols, there's a bunch of manageability issues that are entirely overlapping it. Stephen continues that one of things that Alvaro will probably hint in that BoF is should this be a separate activity or should it be combined in the DTN working group? Regardless of what the answer is, Stephen thinks that would have an effect on a proposed research group. Not just the selection of protocols, but also the overlapping manageability issues and dealing with spacecraft characteristics would be something common to all three things, if all three things existed.
Alvaro responded and said that he's already aware of that, and there's been some discussion with DTN already that Alvaro wasn't apart of. Some people want to focus on the Bundle protocol, and other people want to focus on IP and they feel they can't live in the same place.
Colin adds that there does seem to be a personnel issue here. Colin doesn't know how much of it is technical, but they're trying to do technical technically different things and how much is just the people don't get along, but there is certainly a bit of both.
Stephen says that it's not just people also, just to be fair to the people proposing the BoF. The space agencies that are supporting use of the Bundle protocol are also antagonistic towards any other ideas now that they think they've brought it into the Bundle protocol and are planning to use that for 20 years. Stephen thinks it's not just personalities, there's also an underlying tension there.
Colin says that he understands that there's a reason for wanting to maybe change more slowly than they do in some bits of the internet.
Rodney adds that the WIDE project started a working group on space networking in conjunction with JAXA last year, which is Japan's equivalent to NASA. Nasa has bunch of people invested in figuring out how to do the interplanetary networking stuff and JAXA has a couple, and WIDE is starting to put in some effort but that's mostly through connection with the IPNSIG people. The head of IPNSG is a guy name Kaneko who is Japanese, but lives in Southern California. Rodney thinks he used to work at JPL, so WIDE obviously has a general bias started working in through and with IETF and IRTF. Rodney continues to say that after spending a day with him and the other people, Rodney is convinced that they're both research and development issues on cislunar and networking for Mars. That stuff has a path to being deployed.
Colin says this is one where we have to wait until after the IETF and see how the BoF goes. The Green one maybe mighty further ahead.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17M5J_SVwgMaPPMPjMCjaKWfRcAWPS4TuKNynC3eKa0I/edit?usp=sharing
Jenny asks the group to please check out the Google Doc and send suggestions if anyone has any, and also thanks to Stephen for all his help in giving us some great recommendations.
Colin asks Stephen about dining at the college.
Stephen said they responded and said that the Wednesday is not available.
Colin adds that he announced that COINRG is going to close after it's finished it's current documents. He doesn't think there's much to say, they did some interesting work. This community and the subjects and the industry moved away from it a little. It did good things, but now perhaps past its time. Colin is open to suggestions for more groups in that space, but they need a different charter and a different focus.
The second AOB Colin mentions is that ANRP nominations are expected to open this week, so please consider nominating things.
The third one is that the interviews for the IRTF chair candidates is starting in about 15 minutes . If anyone has feedback on the candidates, please do send them to the IAB, we would certainly appreciate feedback.
Colin asks Jenny if there's anything to talk about with the travel grants?
Jenny said everyone is currently waiting for their visa to get processed, so we haven't had any confirmations yet.
The last AOB is that the next IRSG Teleconference on October 29, 2024 is canceled since it's days before the IETF meeting. The next IRSG telechat will be on November 26.