Subject: AERO/OMNI transition to the IETF

From: "Templin (US), Fred L" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2021 18:43:27 +0000

Members of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Aeronautical
Telecommunications Network (ATN) Community and the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF),

As you know, the AERO and OMNI technologies have been under development for many
years within the ATN Working Group I (WG-I) and Mobility Subgroup (MSG) communities,
but their technical specifications are now complete and ready for adoption by the IETF.
The final products are in the following IETF "Internet Drafts" dated 7/2/2021:

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-templin-6man-aero-22.txt
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-templin-6man-omni-33.txt

These documents will remain in their current form unless and until they are ADOPTED by
the IETF for progression to some form of Requests for Comments (RFC) publication. In the
interim, an "Issue Tracker" will be maintained for each document to track any technical
and/or editorial errata reported between now and IETF adoption.

As you may be aware, there has been an impasse as to how to encourage the IETF to adopt
the work with the goal of producing RFCs. The possible avenues for RFC publication include:

1) IETF working group documents
In this approach, the document is adopted by a new or existing IETF working group, with
the ultimate goal of progressing to a Working Group Last Call (WGLC), an IESG ballot,
a resolution of all outstanding issues and finally publication as either Standards Track,
Informational or Experimental-category RFC.

2) IESG Area Director (AD) sponsorship
The AD Sponsored approach is sometimes taken in which an IETF AD (e.g., Routing Area,
Internet Area, etc.) serves as "Document Shepherd" and brings the work forward outside
the context of any IETF working group but within scope of their area of responsibility. The
document would undergo IESG review the same as for a working group document, again
with Standards Track, Informational or Experimental-category as possible outcomes.
 
3) Independent Submissions through the RFC-ISE Editor
The ISE stream allows anyone with work that is relevant to the IETF and of sufficient
quality to submit an Internet Draft directly to the RFC-ISE Editor. The work is then
progressed toward RFC publication with a note that it is related to the IETF but is not
an IETF standard of any kind. In this alternative, only Informational or Experimental
documents are possible and Standards Track is not an option. While there have been
examples of non-Standards Track works that have been implemented by vendors of
widely distributed implementations, this seems to be the exception rather than the
normal course of events for ISE stream documents.

>From the above alternatives, it should be clear that AERO and OMNI should be published
as Standards-Track if at all possible as either an IETF working group or AD-sponsored
product (i.e., options 1 or 2). While publication through option 3) would also attain the
desirable end -state of an IETF RFC publication, failure to attain Standards Track could
fail to encourage a wide range of network equipment vendors to implement the
technologies in their products which could lead to either few or no equipment vendor
products to choose from.

To date, several overtures have been made to the IETF including publication of a liaison
statement requesting IETF action:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1676/

The AERO/OMNI works were then brought to the attention of the IETF 6man working group
where they were largely ignored, including a presentation at IETF110 that drew no comments
or discussion. This led the author to conclude that the scope of the work is too broad for the
6man charter; therefore, following finalization of the drafts the works were then offered to
the IETF rtgwg and intarea working groups for presentation at IETF111 held last week.

At IETF111, a presentation to rtgwg generated substantial discussion on the chat session for
which a summary note was posted on the rtgwg mailing list:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/rtgwg/oNPr8BA_4esFDXTmY-CbBRhkJ2I/

The IETF111 presentation to intarea generated no discussion, presumably due to the author's
attempt  to cram 60 mins worth of detailed presentation materials into a 20 min timeslot
which may have been better served by a shorter presentation with higher-level bullet points.

With all of the above under consideration, the following are now seen as possible ways
forward toward RFC publication:

1) Publish AERO as a WG item of the rtgwg working group, while publishing OMNI as a WG
item of the intarea working group.

2) Publish one of AERO/OMNI as a WG item, while publishing the other as AD Sponsored.

3) Publish both AERO/OMNI as AD sponsored (i.e., with AERO in the routing area and
OMNI in the Internet area)

4) Form a new ATN IETF working group using the [email-masked] mailing list for coordination
and publish both AERO/OMNI as working documents of this new working group.

5) Publish both AERO and OMNI as RFC ISE stream Informational Category documents.

6) Other

Of these alternatives, operating within the context of an existing working group or through
AD-sponsorship (options 1-3) would provide the fastest paths toward a Standards-Track
publication, while publishing through the RFC ISE stream (option 5) could potentially provide
an even faster path but for a lesser publication category. Option 4) (form a new working group)
could also be considered, but would likely take multiple years with cooperation needed from a
significant number of contributors since first a "Birds of a Feather (BoF)" would first need to be
held at an upcoming IETF meeting, followed by selection of working group chairs followed by
development and ratification of a working group charter, etc. And, it is not clear that ICAO's
deadlines would be met by an approach that could take 3-5 years or even longer to produce
a final product.

So, the purpose of this message is to both inform the ICAO and IETF communities of possible
ways forward toward AERO/OMNI IETF RFC publication and to request interested parties
to respond to this message to confirm that some form of IETF action is desired. This is
especially true for members of the [email-masked] list who are not regular IETF participants.
This appeal is being posted also to the IETF working groups as well as wg chairs/ADs
where the work might potentially be taken up.

In closing, the technical work on AERO and OMNI is now complete. So, if they are indeed
wanted by ICAO (and/or any other interest groups) the time for discussion on publication
ways forward has come. Please send responses to this list (keeping the To:/Cc:) to express
your interest.

Sincerely, Fred Templin
[email-masked]
[email-masked]