Colin Perkins

csperkins.org

Notes from IETF 121 in Dublin

24 November 2024

I recently attended the IETF 121 meeting, held in Dublin from 2-8 November 2024. While there, I worked to help charter new IRTF research groups on sustainability and the Internet, and on deep-space networking, helped to support initiatives to improve IETF mailing list moderation and finalise an IRTF code of conduct, and even engaged with some technical work!

A major focus of the meeting was discussing and planning for the potential IRTF Sustainability and the Internet research group. With the recent creation of the GREEN Working Group in the IETF – chartered to consider use cases, requirements, and solutions for energy efficiency metrics, monitoring and controlling energy consumption of network devices, and optimising energy efficiency – it’s time to think what are the longer-term activities where the IRTF can usefully contribute.

The discussion was both spirited and useful, both in email and in-person during the meeting in Dublin – thank you to all who participated! The proposed charter for the group has seen some extensive revisions, and now considers to characterise and reduce the Internet’s footprint to ensure it is environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable from a systems perspective; to explore the role of policy in ensuring sustainability as a complement to technical measures; to explore strategies for managing Jevon’s paradox to ensure sustained carbon footprint reduction; and to appraise new methodologies, architectures and strategies to ensure Internet resilience in the face of climate change.

Discussion is ongoing to refine the proposed charter to ensure the work is focussed and to make clear the relationship with the IETF GREEN WG and the IAB e-impact programme, but things are moving strongly in the right direction thanks to the tireless work of the three proponents – Ali Rezaki, Eve Schooler, and Michael Welzl. I hope that we’ll be able to charter the group in the coming weeks, in time for the next IETF and IRTF meetings in March 2025.

Also under discussion in Dublin was a potential SPACE research group. This again complements an IETF activity, in this case the DEEPSPACE BoF, and is considering the challenges in extending the Internet to cislunar environments, to support plans by NASA and others to return to the Moon in coming years, and to potentially extend the use of the Internet protocols out to deep space environments. This work is less mature than the sustainability research group, and there’s a need to carefully scope both this activity and any IETF standards activity that emerges, but it’s interesting to consider research focussed on supporting space science and exploration, distinct from the ever-increasing commercial rush to build LEO satellite mega-constellations.

In addition to these potential new research groups, the IETF and IRTF are both making progress with their ongoing efforts to enhance diversity and bring in new people from a wider range of backgrounds and countries. The IETF Moderation Procedures Working Group, that’s working to update the processes and guidelines for mailing list moderation practises, had a successful first meeting and in the IRTF we made good progress on finalising the new IRTF Code of Conduct.

Due to the generosity of the diversity travel grant sponsors, we were also able to bring in new participants, and to support ongoing engagement, for a number of people from under-represented groups and parts of the world.

At the time of this writing, applications are being accepted for travel grants to attend IRTF events co-located with the upcoming IETF 122 meeting in Bangkok, in March 2025.

Technical work? There was plenty of that, of course! On the research side, my post-doc, Ryo Yanagida, gave a great presentation in the Research and Analysis of Standards-setting Processes Research Group (RASPRG) reviewing some of the recent work we've done on characterising the IETF standards process, as part of a broader meeting that also included a nice study of the impact of meeting location on participation in 3GPP and IETF.

In the IETF, the Standard Communication with Network Elements (SCONE) working group is starting to developing an interface for cooperation between the network and media applications to help optimise use quality of experience, and the media over QUIC working group is developing interesting new named-data approaches to media delivery – both topics that align with my interests.