IEFT . Abbreviation in English of Internet Engineering Task Force corresponding to Internet Engineering Task Force. Open international community of network designers , operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the evolution of the architecture of the Internet and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to anyone interested. The mission of the IETF is documented in RFC 3935.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, collaborating closely with the W3C and ISO / IEC, standard bodies and referring in particular to the standards of the TCP / IP protocol and the Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal participation or membership requirements. All participants and administrators are volunteers, although their work is often funded by their employers or sponsors.
Summary
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- 1 Organization
- 2 Origins
- 3 Mission
- 4 Operations
- 5 The Internet Standards Process
- 6 See also
- 7 References
- 8 External links
Organization
The IETF is organized into a large number of working groups and informal discussion groups (BOF), each dedicated to a specific topic. Each group intends to complete the work on that topic and then dissolve. Each task force has an appointed chair (or sometimes multiple co-chairs), along with a letter describing their approach, and what and when they are expected to produce.
The working groups are organized by topic. Current areas include: Applications, General, Internet , Operations, and Infrastructure and Real-time Application Management, Routing, Security, and Transportation. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The area directors are responsible for appointing the chairs of the working groups. The area directors, together with the President of the IETF, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF.
The IETF is formally part of the Internet Society . The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which oversees foreign relations, and relations with the RFC Editor . The IAB is also co-responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the activity of the IETF Administrative Support (IASA), which provides logistical support, etc., for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of relationships through the group.
origins
The first meeting of the IETF was on January 16, 1986 , composed of 21 researchers funded by the United States government . It was a continuation of the work of the previous EADG Task Force.
Initially, it met quarterly, but beginning in 1991 , it has met three times a year. Representatives of non-governmental entities were invited from the fourth meeting of the IETF, in October of that year. Since then all IETF meetings have been open to the public. Most of the IETF’s work is done on the mailing lists, and attendance at the meeting is not required for taxpayers.
The first meetings were very small, with less than 35 people in attendance for each of the first five meetings. The maximum attendance during the first 13 meetings was only 120 attendees. This occurred at the 12th meeting held in January 1989 . These meetings have grown in both participation and outreach considerably since the 1990s , which had a peak attendance of nearly 3,000 as of the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, California . Attendance declined due to industry restructuring during the first decade of 2000, and around 1200 today.
During the 1990s the IETF has changed its institutional form from being an activity of the United States government to an independent, international activity related to the Internet society.
Mission
The IETF’s mission is to make the Internet work better by producing high-quality technical documents that influence the way people design, use and manage the Internet.
The IETF will continue this mission by adhering to the following cardinal principles:
Open process – anyone interested can participate in the work, know what was decided, and have their voice heard on the matter. Part of this principle is your commitment to make your documents, your Task Force mailing lists, your attendance lists, and your meeting minutes available to the public on the Internet.
Technical competence – the subjects on which the IETF produces its documents are subjects on which the IETF has the necessary competence to discuss them, and which the IETF is willing to listen to technically competent input from any source. Technical competence also means that it is expected that the IETF output has to be designed to look like early network engineering – this is also often referred to as “quality engineering”.
Lead Volunteers – Participants and leadership are people who come to the IETF because they want to do the work that furthers the IETF’s mission of “making the Internet work better.”
Consensus and Code Execution – Makes standards based on the combined engineering judgment of its participants and their real-world experience in applying and deploying specifications.
Protocol ownership – when the IETF takes ownership of a protocol or function, it accepts responsibility for all aspects of the protocol, even though some aspects may very rarely or never be seen on the Internet. In contrast, when the IETF is not responsible for a protocol or function, it does not seek to exercise control over it, although it can sometimes touch or affect the Internet.
Operations
The details of its operations have changed considerably as it has grown, but the basic mechanism remains the publication of a draft of specifications, independent review and testing of the participants, and the re-publication. Interoperability is the main test of the IETF specifications becoming standards. Most of its specifications focus on individual protocols rather than tightly interlaced systems. This has allowed its protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are systematically re-used by bodies that create full-fledged architectures (eg 3GPP IMS).
Because it relies on volunteers and uses rough consensus and code execution as its cornerstone, results can be slow when the number of volunteers is too small to move forward, or so large as to make consensus difficult, or when volunteers lack the necessary experience. For protocols like SMTP , which is used to transport E-mailfor a user community of many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change that is not fully supported. Work within the IETF on ways to improve speed in the standard setting process is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is so large, consensus mechanisms on how to improve they have been slow.
Because the IETF has no members (nor is it an organization per se), the Internet Society provides the financial and legal framework for the activities of the IETF and its related bodies (IAB, IRTF, …). Recently, the IETF has created an IETF conglomerate that manages the copyrighted materials produced by the IETF. The activities of the IETF are funded by meeting fees, meeting sponsors, and by the Internet Society through its membership of the organization and Public Interest Registry resources.
IETF meetings vary greatly in where they are held. The list of past and future meeting venues can be found on the IETF Meetings page . The IETF has endeavored to hold meetings close to where most volunteers are. For a long time, the goal was 3 meetings a year, with 2 in North America and 1 in Europe or Asia (alternating between them every two years). The target ratio is currently, over a two-year period, to have 3 in North America, 2 in Europe, and 1 in Asia. However, corporate sponsorship of meetings is often a more important factor and this schedule has not been strictly adhered to in order to lower operating costs.
The Internet Standards Process
The basic definition of the IETF standards process is found in RFC 2026 (BCP 9). However, this document has been modified several times. The intellectual property rules are now separate, in RFC 5378 (BCP 78) (rights of contributions) and RFC 3979 (BCP 79) (rights of technology). Another update is RFC 3932 (BCP 92) (communications independent of the RFC Editor). An overview of the process for many documents is available in the IETF Process: An Informal Guide .
The process of creating an Internet standard is straightforward: a specification that undergoes a development period and several iterations of review by the Internet community and review based on experience, is adopted as a standard by the competent authority and is publishes. In practice, the process is more complicated, due to the difficulty of creating high-quality technical specifications, the need to consider the interests of all affected parties, the importance of establishing a generalized community consensus, and the difficulty of evaluating the usefulness of a particular specification to the Internet community.
The objectives of the Internet Standards Process are
- Technical excellence;
- Before application and testing;
- Clear, concise and easy to understand documentation;
- Openness and fairness, and
The goal of technical competence, the prerequisite for application and testing, and the need for all interested parties to make observations, require a lot of time and effort. On the other hand, the rapid development of today’s networks, demand for specific technological development of standards. The Internet standardization process is intended to balance these conflicting goals. The process is believed to be as short and straightforward as possible without sacrificing technical excellence, extensive testing before the adoption of a standard, or openness and fairness.
