From the Editor's Desk

By: Mat Ford

Date: June 8, 2012

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The beautiful city of Paris, France, played host to the 83rd meeting of the IETF, which, as always, contained a vibrant and diverse mix of Internet technology discussions, debates, and proposals from attendees drawn from every region of the globe. In this issue of the IETF Journal we have tried to capture a flavour of the proceedings.

Our cover article provides a useful introduction to the important topic of provisioning user identity for online services. As more and more applications and services run ‘in the cloud’, building efficient and scalable infrastructure to support them and lend them increased flexibility is important.
Another question that received renewed attention during IETF 83 is that of congestion control for real-time communication. On page 18, Randell Jesup provides an interesting introduction to the problem space, some of the relevant preexisting work, and one proposal now being discussed.
Jose Saldana had a baptism by fire as a new attendee when he offered a tutorial on online gaming network traffic and found many interested attendees ready to hear him speak. He writes about his experiences and his work on improving efficiency of gaming traffic on page 20.
Also in this issue are our regular columns by the IAB, IETF, and IRTF chairs; coverage of hot topics discussed during plenary meetings; and a piece on the contributions fellows make to the IETF.
As always, we are grateful to all our contributors. Send comments and suggestions for contributions to [email protected]. And remember, you can subscribe to the hardcopy version or via email at