Subject: WG ACTION: Differentiated Services (diffserv)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 1998 08:10:25 -0500

A new working group has been formed in the Transport Area of the IETF.
For additional information, contact the Area Directors
or the WG Chair.

Differentiated Services (diffserv)
----------------------------------

 Current Status: Active Working Group

 Chair(s):
     Brian Carpenter <[email-masked]>
     Kathleen Nichols <[email-masked]>

 Transport Area Director(s):
     Scott Bradner  <[email-masked]>
     Allyn Romanow  <[email-masked]>

 Transport Area Advisor:
     Scott Bradner  <[email-masked]>

 Mailing Lists:
     General Discussion:[email-masked]
     To Subscribe:      [email-masked]
         In Body:       subscribe diff-serv
     Archive:           http://www-nrg.ee.lbl.gov/diff-serv-arch/

Description of Working Group:

There is a clear need for relatively simple and coarse methods of
providing differentiated classes of service for Internet traffic, to
support various types of applications, and specific business
requirements. The differentiated services approach to providing quality
of service in networks employs a small, well- defined set of building
blocks from which a variety of services may be built. A small
bit-pattern in each packet, in the IPv4 TOS octet or the IPv6 Traffic
Class octet, is used to mark a packet to receive a particular
forwarding treatment, or per-hop behavior, at each network node. A
common understanding about the use and interpretation of this
bit-pattern is required for inter-domain use, multi-vendor
interoperability, and consistent reasoning about expected service
behaviors in a network. Thus, the Working Group will standardize a
common layout to be used for both octets, called the 'DS byte'. A
standards-track document will be produced that will define the general
use of fields within the DS byte (superseding the IPv4 TOS octet
definitions of RFC 1349). The Working Group will also assign specific
per-hop behaviors to a small number of particular patterns or
'code-points' of the DS byte. The standardized code-points will only
apply to per-hop behaviors already in widespread common usage within
the global internet, e.g, the forwarding treatment received by
best-effort traffic.

In addition to the standards-track specification document, an
informational framework document will be produced. The framework
document will define the differentiated services architecture and a
common language for differentiated services. Example uses and services
will be described.

Another goal of the WG is to experiment with other per-hop behaviors
that can be used to produce additional services. These will be
documented in internet drafts. It will be decided whether these
additional code-points and per-hop behaviors should be specified in
experimental RFCs or should become standardized. The WG will also
investigate the additional components necessary to support
differentiated services, including such traffic conditioners as traffic
shapers and packet markers that could be used at the boundaries of
networks. The WG may also define mechanisms such as LDAP schemata to
map user service profiles into differentiated services at the network
boundary. Later documents will cover these issues.

The group will analyze related security threats, especially theft of
service or denial of service attacks, and suggest counter-measures.

The group will not work on mechanisms for the identification of
individual traffic flows within the network, or on signalling
mechanisms to support the marking of packets.

 Goals and Milestones:

   Apr 98       Meet at LA IETF to review strawman spec

   Apr 98       Initial discussions and outline for framework doc (FYI)

   Apr 98       Revised drafts of spec and framework

   Jun 98       Interim meeting to review spec and framework docs

   Jul 98       Submit drafts to IESG for consideration as RFCs

   Aug 98       Meet at Chicago IETF to discuss boundary mechanisms and traffic
                conditioners

   Oct 98       Publish drafts on boundary mechanisms and traffic conditioners

   Dec 98       Meet at IETF to finalise boundary mechanisms and traffic
                conditioners documents