IETF News

Message from the IETF Chair

By: Russ Housley

Date: October 6, 2011

line break image

The IETF participants are energetic! The work of the IETF is highly relevant!

IETF 81 was held in Quebec City, Canada. It was a successful meeting, attended by 1,057 people from 46 countries. This first-time meeting in Quebec City was wonderfully hosted by Research In Motion (RIM)—convention center facilities were very comfortable and Tuesday evening’s social event at the Musée de la Civilisation was well attended. Comcast and .ca were our sponsors, and Bell and Telus provided network connectivity. Thanks to all for your support.

Many working groups made significant progress at IETF 81, and it was a genuine pleasure to see so many talented people engaged and collaborating.

Since IETF 80, five working groups (WGs) have been chartered and five have closed—our count remains steady at 121 WGs. Between meetings, the WGs and their individual contributors produced 553 new Internet-Drafts and updated 1,138 existing Internet-Drafts, some more than once. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved 100 Internet-Drafts for publication as RFCs. The RFC Editor published 149 new RFCs.

The BEHAVE Working Group has essentially finished its work on mechanisms to help transition from IPv4 to IPv6. I look forward to the day when the vast majority of Internet traffic is using IPv6, and these mechanisms are removed from the Internet. The HOMENET Working Group is an important step in this direction. This new working group is working on specifications for IPv6 for residential networks.

The IETF continues to improve its tools. The Datatracker provides a great deal of visibility into the processing of the documents in the IETF stream. The Datatracker was recently extended to include visibility into actions within Working Groups. Over the next few months, it will be further extended to provide visibility into the processing of documents in the IRTF, IAB, and Independent Submission streams.

IETF 82 will take place in Taipei, Taiwan, 13–18 November 2011, and will be hosted by the Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC). Scheduling information for the upcoming IETF meetings can always be found at http://www.ietf.org/meetings/meetings.html. I look forward to seeing you there.

The mission of the Internet Engineering Task Force is to make the Internet work better by producing high-quality and relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet. See http://www.ietf.org.