Getting new work started in the IETF usually requires a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) meeting to discuss goals for the work, the suitability of the IETF as a venue for pursuing the work, and the level of interest in and support for the work. In this article, we’ll review the BoFs that took place during IETF 97, including their intentions and outcomes. If you’re inspired to arrange a BoF meeting, please be sure to read RFC 5434: “Considerations for Having a Successful Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) Session”.
Bundled Domains (dnsbundled)
Description: This BoF focussed on the challenges of fully mapping one domain name to another domain name. With the emergence of internationalized domain names and new TLDs, it is often useful to redirect one domain name tree fully to another domain name tree. Current DNS protocols do not provide good tools to satisfy these requirements.
Proceedings: N/A
Outcome: The proponents were unable to demonstrate a coherent set of problems or use cases. Several participants felt that this was work that had been proposed and failed before, due to lack of clarity and lack of due consideration to collateral damage caused by proposed solutions.
Bandwidth Aggregation for Internet Access (banana)
Description: This BoF discussed ways to take advantage of multiple access links provided by one or more access providers in cases where end nodes and applications may not be multi-access-aware. Use of multiple access links could provide bandwidth aggregation when multiple links are available (i.e., improved performance), and session continuation when a link becomes unavailable (i.e., increased reliability).
Proceedings: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/97/minutes/minutes-97-banana-00.txt
Outcome: This was a non-WG forming BoF and, as such, provided an opportunity for participants to explore the problem space, identify and share requirements and challenges, and try to scope the work to something that isn’t already being done elsewhere and that is relevant to the IETF community. There was clearly energy and interest to continue working on some aspects of this problem space and discussion will continue on the mailing list to try to better scope the problem (or problems) that people want to work on.