The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is chartered both as a committee of the IETF and as an advisory body of the Internet Society (ISOC). Its responsibilities include architectural oversight of IETF activities, Internet Standards Process oversight and appeal, and the appointment of the RFC Editor. The IAB is also responsible for the management of the IETF protocol parameter registries.
Like the rest of the IETF, the IAB’s lasting contributions are made through the development and publication of documents. Recent IAB document highlights include
- “What’s in a name – False assumptions about DNS Names” (draft-iab-dns-assumptions); will be sent to the RFC editor shortly
- “Architectural Implications of Link Layer Indications” (draft-iab-link-indications)
- IAB Processes for management of liaison relationships (published as BCP102, RFC4052)
- Writing Protocol Models (published as RFC4101)
The IAB members met during a retreat in June and discussed the priorities for this year. The following areas were identified as key organizing items:
- IPv6 (helping detect and promote solutions of pieces missing to get IPv6 deployed).
- Internet Architecture (there are specific underlying Internet engineering principles that are not well-documented; this “common knowledge” needs to be documented better).
- Bad net traffic (providing pointers to documents and overviews on what the real issues are about bad net traffic and to provide tools to reduce the impact of such activities; also see Steve Bellovin’s presentation during IETF 63 technical plenary).
To help organize and inform IAB discussions on particular topics, informal (ad hoc) committees are formed from time to time. Currently, these include:
- the IPv6 ad hoc committee, which is composed of IAB, IESG, RIR-aware folks looking at IPv6 address allocation and related technical issues. The purpose is to provide an opportunity to detect areas that need further exploration within or across the IETF or RIR communities, and promote the discussion and resolution of any such issues within the appropriate communities.
- the IDN ad hoc committee, which was formed to review technical issues that are facing deployment of IDNs and propose appropriate next steps for appropriate usage and/or standardization of IDNs.
All documents published by the IAB are listed here.
All current IAB Internet-Drafts are can be found here.
Minutes of IAB meetings are published here.
For more info about the IAB: http://www.iab.org.