ISOC’s Standards & Technology department offers the following “rough guide” to hot topics being discussed at the 73rd IETF meeting in Minneapolis
(November 16-21, 2008). This simply indicates which meeting sessions are
particularly focused on the following topics:

• Bandwidth Management
• IPv4/IPv6 Coexistence
• DNSSEC
• Trust and Identity

Remote participation in all meetings will be possible — see specific
meetings listed on http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/ for access to audio stream and jabber rooms. That page also includes links to helpful tarballs of documents being discussed at meetings, etc.

For the full IETF meeting plan and agenda, see http://www.ietf.org/meetings/73/

Bandwidth Management
——————–
As P2P and VoIP technologies become more prevalent, and network usage
patterns sometimes deviate from their architects’ expectations, management
of bandwidth to allow best use for customers becomes an increasingly
important topic.

Key meetings at IETF73:

ALTO WG — application techniques for identifying and using bandwidth
parameters.

Designing and specifying a service that will provide applications with
information to perform better-than-random initial peer selection based
on factors including maximum bandwidth, minimum cross-domain traffic, lowest
cost to the user, etc.

Currently scheduled: Tuesday, November 18, 13:00-15:00
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/alto.html
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/alto-charter.html

LEDBAT WG — alternative transport congestion management techniques
Chartered to standardize a congestion control mechanism that should
saturate the bottleneck, maintain low delay, and yield to standard TCP.
What this means in practice – applications that do large background
transfers (e.g. P2P apps) could use this mechanism and would then
automatically yield in the presence of bursty web traffic, or other
TCP-using apps. Particularly useful for P2P uploads on thin home uplinks.

Currently scheduled: Thursday, November 20, 13:00-15:00
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/ledbat.html [not available
as of this writing]
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ledbat-charter.html

IPv4/IPv6 Coexistence
———————
As there is increasing momentum to deploy IPv6, as well as recognition
that IPv4 and IPv6 network realities must coexist, work is being done to
develop specifications to allow interoperable behaviour between networked
realities.

BEHAVE WG — NAT standardization WG
Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT), alternatives to CGNAT, new approaches to
v4/v6 translation, IPv6 NAT

Currently scheduled for 3 meeting sessions from Wed through Friday
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/behave-charter.html
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/behave.html

SOFTWIRE WG — DSlite dual stack
Tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 to enable incremental IPv6 deployment and to
address the imminent IPv4 address shortage for large providers.

Currently scheduled: Thursday, November 20, 17:40-19:30
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/softwire-charter.html
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/softwire.html [not available
as of this writing]

DNSSEC
——
While the US Department of Commerce is calling for input on the question
of signing the DNS root (using DNSSEC), IETF working group discussions will
be focused on refinements of the technology, and consideration of
implications of IPv6 NATing (for coexistence with IPv4) and DNSSEC.

DNSEXT WG — DNS extensions

Currently scheduled: Tuesday, November 18, 15:20-17:00
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/dnsext-charter.html
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/dnsext.html

BEHAVE WG — for implications of DNSSEC & v4/v6 NATing

WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/behave-charter.html
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/behave.html

Issues of Trust and Identity
—————————-
As concerns increase about security of infrastructure, privacy, trust
and identity on the Internet, these themes are appearing in several working
group discussions.

DKIM WG — e-mail infrastructure
Currently scheduled: Thursday, November 20, 13:00-15:00
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/dkim-charter.html
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/dkim.html

GEOPRIV WG — privacy issues
Currently scheduled: Tuesday, November 18, 09:00-11:30
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/geopriv-charter.html
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/geopriv.html

SIDR WG — resource certification
Currently scheduled: Monday, November 17, 13:00-15:00
WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/sidr-charter.html
WG agenda: http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/73/sidr.html