IRTF activities co-located with IETF 108
3 August 2020
The IETF 108 meeting was originally planned for Madrid, from 27-31 July
2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the meeting was held as an
online-only event. Seven of the IRTF research groups and the ACM/IRTF
Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW) met co-located the IETF
meeting, and three Applied Networking Research Prizes were awarded.
The IRTF currently has 14 active research groups and no proposed
research groups. Of these, seven research groups met co-located
with IETF 108. Some highlights of the work include:
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The Computation in the Network Research Group
had some nice presentations and discussion on requirements and directions for computing
in the network, that are starting to develop a taxonomy and structure the problem space.
There were also some presentations of industrial use cases, data discovery, and a common
data layer, and some discussion of the relevance of these to in-network computation and
the relation with information-centric
networking.
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The Global Access to the Internet for All Research Group
had excellent talks on the Zenzeleni Community Network model for
addressing the digital divide in rural South Africa, on an approach to
building a low emission university campus for the South East European
University in North Macedonia, and on environmental sustainability of the
Internet.
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The Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group
had interesting talks by Eva Galperin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Internet
centralisation ("Whose Internet is This? Moving the Periphery to the Center") and by Simon
McGarr from Data Compliance Europe on an EU data rights view on applications for COVID-19
contact tracing. There were also updates on research group drafts on Freedom of Association
on the Internet and on Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and Architecture Considerations.
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The Network Management Research Group
had an update on research challenges in AI for network management, several presentations
on intent-based networking, and a report from the
virtual IETF hackathon.
-
The Network Coding Research Group
had an updated on Coding and congestion control in transport and on results from the
virtual IETF hackathon. The chairs believe this research group is coming to the end
of its work, and expect that it may close in the next year.
-
The Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Research Group
discussed the privacy of COVID-19 tracing applications, traffic de-anonymisation,
censorship, personal information tagging in logfiles, and guidelines for conducting
safe measurements of the Internet.
-
The Quantum Internet Research Group
discussed ongoing work on use cases and principles for the design of the quantum Internet,
and new work to classify attacks on quantum
repeaters.
Two side meetings, on 6G-and-IP and on Future Internet Protocol Evolution,
discussed topics that might form the basis of future IRTF work. Both are at
an early stage, and currently lack the focus needed to form research groups.
The ACM/IRTF Applied Networking
Research Workshop was held co-located with the IETF 108 meeting.
This is an academic workshop that provides a forum for researchers,
vendors, network operators, and the Internet standards community to
present and discuss emerging results in applied networking research,
and to find inspiration from topics and open problems discussed at the
IETF.
The ANRW programme
included eight full papers and five shorter position papers. The full
papers discussed
privacy-aware DNS zone transfers,
limiting the power of RPKI certificate authorities,
describing and parsing protocol data,
network stack testing,
the impact of network pathologies on TCP,
packet scheduling in L4S networks,
debugging QUIC,
and
IP geolocation.
Position papers discussed measuring inbound source address filtering,
filtering routing announcements, programmable inter-domain routing,
information exposure with ALTO, and traffic engineering.
The online-only forum gave the opportunity to schedule the workshop more
closely with relevant IETF working group sessions, and as a result there
was some good discussion and interaction between the researchers and the
standards community.
The ANRW 2021 will take place in July 2020 co-locating with IETF 111,
hopefully in San Francisco.
Finally, three Applied Networking
Research Prize (ANRP) awards were made, to
Shehar Bano for her work to develop a taxonomy of Internet host liveness,
Chaoyi Lu for his work on measuring DNS-over-encryption, and
Ingmar Poese for his work on traffic engineering.
Nominations for the 2021 Applied Networking Research Prize will open in September 2020.