Internet Engineering Task Force
Encyclopedia
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standard
s, cooperating closely with the W3C
and ISO
/IEC
standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite
. It is an open standards organization
, with no formal membership or membership requirements.
All participants and managers are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by VeriSign
and the U.S. government's National Security Agency
.
s and informal discussion groups (BoF)s
, each dealing with a specific topic. Each group is intended to complete work on that topic and then disband. Each working group has an appointed chairperson (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce. It is open to all who want to participate, and holds discussions on an open mailing list
or at IETF meetings. The mailing list consensus is the final arbiter of decision-making. There is no voting procedure, as it operates on rough consensus
process.
The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter. Current areas include: Applications, General, Internet, Operations and Management, Real-time Applications and Infrastructure, Routing, Security, and Transport. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group
(IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF. The groups will normally be closed once the work described in its charter is finished. In some cases, the WG will instead have its charter updated to take on new tasks as appropriate.
The IETF is formally a part of the Internet Society
. The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board
(IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity
(IASA), which provides logistical, etc. support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force
(IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.
.
Initially, it met quarterly, but from 1991, it has been meeting 3 times a year. Representatives from non-governmental entities were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting, during October of that year. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to the public. The majority of the IETF's work is done on mailing lists, and meeting attendance is not required for contributors.
The initial meetings were very small, with fewer than 35 people in attendance at 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 during January 1989. These meetings have grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 1990s; it had a maximum attendance of almost 3000 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, CA. Attendance declined with industry restructuring during the early 2000s, and is currently around 1200.
During the early 1990s the IETF changed institutional form from an activity of the U.S. government to an independent, international activity associated with the Internet Society
.
IMS
).
Because it relies on volunteers and uses "rough consensus and running code
" as its touchstone, results can be slow whenever the number of volunteers is either too small to make progress, or so large as to make consensus difficult, or when volunteers lack the necessary expertise. For protocols like SMTP, which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change that is not fully backwards compatible. Work within the IETF on ways to improve the speed of the standards-making process is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus mechanisms on how to improve have been slow.
Because the IETF does not have members (nor is it an organisation per se), the Internet Society
provides the financial and legal framework for the activities of the IETF and its sister bodies (IAB, IRTF,...). Recently the IETF has set up an IETF Trust that manages the copyrighted materials produced by the IETF. IETF activities are funded by meeting fees, meeting sponsors and by the Internet Society
via its organizational membership and the proceeds of the Public Interest Registry
.
IETF meetings vary greatly in where they are held. The list of past and future meeting locations can be found on the IETF meetings page. The IETF has striven to hold the meetings near where most of the IETF volunteers are located. For a long time, the goal was 3 meetings a year, with 2 in North America and 1 in either Europe or Asia (alternating between them every other year). The goal ratio is currently, during a two year period, to have 3 in North America, 2 in Europe and 1 in Asia. However, corporate sponsorship of the meetings is typically a more important factor and this schedule has not been kept strictly in order to decrease operational costs.
Before 1993, the IETF Chair was selected by the IAB
.
Internet standard
In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force .-Overview:...
s, cooperating closely with the W3C
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
and ISO
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...
/IEC
International Electrotechnical Commission
The International Electrotechnical Commission is a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as "electrotechnology"...
standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite
Internet protocol suite
The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP from its most important protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol , which were the first networking protocols defined in this...
. It is an open standards organization
Standards organization
A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization , or standards setting organization is any organization whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise producing technical standards that are...
, with no formal membership or membership requirements.
All participants and managers are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by VeriSign
VeriSign
Verisign, Inc. is an American company based in Dulles, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code...
and the U.S. government's National Security Agency
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
.
Organization
The IETF is organized into a large number of working groupWorking group
A working group is an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers working on new research activities that would be difficult to develop under traditional funding mechanisms . The lifespan of the WG can last anywhere between a few months and several years...
s and informal discussion groups (BoF)s
Birds of a Feather (computing)
In computing, BoF can refer to:* An informal discussion group. Unlike special interest groups or working groups, BoFs are informal and often formed in an ad-hoc manner...
, each dealing with a specific topic. Each group is intended to complete work on that topic and then disband. Each working group has an appointed chairperson (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce. It is open to all who want to participate, and holds discussions on an open mailing list
Electronic mailing list
An electronic mailing list is a special usage of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to...
or at IETF meetings. The mailing list consensus is the final arbiter of decision-making. There is no voting procedure, as it operates on rough consensus
Rough consensus
Rough consensus is a term used in consensus decision-making to indicate the "sense of the group" concerning a particular matter under consideration. It has been defined as the "dominant view" of a group as determined by its chairperson...
process.
The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter. Current areas include: Applications, General, Internet, Operations and Management, Real-time Applications and Infrastructure, Routing, Security, and Transport. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group
Internet Engineering Steering Group
The Internet Engineering Steering Group is a body composed of the Internet Engineering Task Force chair and area directors.It provides the final technical review of Internet standards and is responsible for day-to-day management of the IETF...
(IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF. The groups will normally be closed once the work described in its charter is finished. In some cases, the WG will instead have its charter updated to take on new tasks as appropriate.
The IETF is formally a part of the Internet Society
Internet Society
The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 to provide direction in Internet related standards, education, and policy...
. The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board
Internet Architecture Board
The Internet Architecture Board is the committee charged with oversight of the technical and engineering development of the Internet by the Internet Society ....
(IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity
IETF Administrative Support Activity
The IETF Administrative Support Activity is an activity housed within the Internet Society .The IASA is described by RFC 4071, an IETF Request for Comments document, released in April, 2005.-External links:**...
(IASA), which provides logistical, etc. support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force
Internet Research Task Force
The Internet Research Task Force focuses on longer term research issues related to the Internet while the parallel organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force , focuses on the shorter term issues of engineering and standards making...
(IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.
History
The first IETF meeting was on January 16, 1986, consisting of 21 U.S.-government-funded researchers. It was a continuation of the work of the earlier GADS Task ForceGADS Task Force
The Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force was the precursor to the Internet Engineering Task Force. Its chairman was David L...
.
Initially, it met quarterly, but from 1991, it has been meeting 3 times a year. Representatives from non-governmental entities were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting, during October of that year. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to the public. The majority of the IETF's work is done on mailing lists, and meeting attendance is not required for contributors.
The initial meetings were very small, with fewer than 35 people in attendance at 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 during January 1989. These meetings have grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 1990s; it had a maximum attendance of almost 3000 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, CA. Attendance declined with industry restructuring during the early 2000s, and is currently around 1200.
During the early 1990s the IETF changed institutional form from an activity of the U.S. government to an independent, international activity associated with the Internet Society
Internet Society
The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 to provide direction in Internet related standards, education, and policy...
.
Operations
The details of its operations have changed considerably as it has grown, but the basic mechanism remains publication of draft specifications, review and independent testing by participants, and republication. Interoperability is the chief test for IETF specifications becoming standards. Most of its specifications are focused on single protocols rather than tightly-interlocked systems. This has allowed its protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are routinely re-used by bodies which create full-fledged architectures (e.g. 3GPP3GPP
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, known as the Organizational Partners...
IMS
IP Multimedia Subsystem
The IP Multimedia Subsystem or IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol multimedia services. It was originally designed by the wireless standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project , as a part of the vision for evolving mobile...
).
Because it relies on volunteers and uses "rough consensus and running code
Rough consensus
Rough consensus is a term used in consensus decision-making to indicate the "sense of the group" concerning a particular matter under consideration. It has been defined as the "dominant view" of a group as determined by its chairperson...
" as its touchstone, results can be slow whenever the number of volunteers is either too small to make progress, or so large as to make consensus difficult, or when volunteers lack the necessary expertise. For protocols like SMTP, which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change that is not fully backwards compatible. Work within the IETF on ways to improve the speed of the standards-making process is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus mechanisms on how to improve have been slow.
Because the IETF does not have members (nor is it an organisation per se), the Internet Society
Internet Society
The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 to provide direction in Internet related standards, education, and policy...
provides the financial and legal framework for the activities of the IETF and its sister bodies (IAB, IRTF,...). Recently the IETF has set up an IETF Trust that manages the copyrighted materials produced by the IETF. IETF activities are funded by meeting fees, meeting sponsors and by the Internet Society
Internet Society
The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 to provide direction in Internet related standards, education, and policy...
via its organizational membership and the proceeds of the Public Interest Registry
Public Interest Registry
Public Interest Registry is a not-for-profit corporation created by the Internet Society in 2002 to manage the .org top-level domain. It took over the operation of the domain from VeriSign on 1 January 2003. Afilias manages the technical operations of the .org registry under a contract with the...
.
IETF meetings vary greatly in where they are held. The list of past and future meeting locations can be found on the IETF meetings page. The IETF has striven to hold the meetings near where most of the IETF volunteers are located. For a long time, the goal was 3 meetings a year, with 2 in North America and 1 in either Europe or Asia (alternating between them every other year). The goal ratio is currently, during a two year period, to have 3 in North America, 2 in Europe and 1 in Asia. However, corporate sponsorship of the meetings is typically a more important factor and this schedule has not been kept strictly in order to decrease operational costs.
Chairs
The IETF Chairperson is selected by the NOMCOM process specified in RFC 3777 for a 2-year term, renewable.Before 1993, the IETF Chair was selected by the IAB
Internet Architecture Board
The Internet Architecture Board is the committee charged with oversight of the technical and engineering development of the Internet by the Internet Society ....
.
- Mike Corrigan (1986)
- Phill Gross (1986–1994)
- Paul MockapetrisPaul MockapetrisDr. Paul V. Mockapetris is the inventor of the Domain Name System.In 1983, he proposed a Domain Name System architecture in RFCs 882 and 883 while at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California....
(1994–1996) - Fred BakerFred Baker (IETF chair)Frederick J. Baker, better known as Fred Baker is an American engineer, specializing in developing computer network protocols for the Internet.-Biography:Baker attended the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1970 to 1973...
(1996–2001) - Harald Tveit AlvestrandHarald Tveit AlvestrandHarald Tveit Alvestrand is a Norwegian computer scientist. He was the chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force from 2001 until 2005...
(2001–2005) - Brian Carpenter (2005–2007)
- Russ HousleyRuss HousleyRuss Housley is the current Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force , since March 2007.Apart from his IETF work, he is a security systems consultant, working under the company name Vigil Security LLC, which he founded in 2002....
(2007–)
See also
- GADS Task ForceGADS Task ForceThe Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force was the precursor to the Internet Engineering Task Force. Its chairman was David L...
- Internet Architecture BoardInternet Architecture BoardThe Internet Architecture Board is the committee charged with oversight of the technical and engineering development of the Internet by the Internet Society ....
- Internet Engineering Steering GroupInternet Engineering Steering GroupThe Internet Engineering Steering Group is a body composed of the Internet Engineering Task Force chair and area directors.It provides the final technical review of Internet standards and is responsible for day-to-day management of the IETF...
- Internet Research Task ForceInternet Research Task ForceThe Internet Research Task Force focuses on longer term research issues related to the Internet while the parallel organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force , focuses on the shorter term issues of engineering and standards making...
- Internet standardInternet standardIn computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force .-Overview:...
- Request for CommentsRequest for CommentsIn computer network engineering, a Request for Comments is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.Through the Internet Society, engineers and...
- StandardizationStandardizationStandardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
External links
- The official IETF site
- IETF Online Proceedings
- Early IETF Proceedings (note: large pdfPortable Document FormatPortable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
files, one for each volume) - Past Meetings of the IETF
- Past IESG Members and IETF Chairs
- The Tao of the IETF: details on how IETF is organized
- IAOC information
- MyIETF Personalized notification service on RFC's and drafts with full archive of old drafts etc.