IETF Journal
Table of Contents - Volume 6, Issue 3 (March 2011)
Edging Toward the End of IPv4: A New Milestone in the History of the Internet
From the Editor’s Desk, by Matthew Ford
 Since the last issue of the IETF Journal went to press, the Internet passed a major milestone in its journey from research network to preeminent global communications medium. The final blocks of unicast IPv4 address space were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries on 3 February 2011. In this issue, Internet Architecture Board (IAB) chair Olaf Kolkman gives us his statement at this juncture in Internet history.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
Message from the IETF Chair
By Russ Housley
 Russ Housley, IETF Chair The work of the IETF remains relevant and energetic!
IETF 79 was held in Beijing, China. It was a very successful meeting attended by 1177 people from 52 different countries. Many visited China for the first time. The Chinese were wonderful hosts and the facilities in the Shangri-La Hotel were outstanding. Many working groups made significant progress, and it was a genuine pleasure to see so many talented people engaged and collaborating.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
Words from the IAB Chair
By Olaf Kolkman
On 4 February the last five /8 IPv4 blocks from the free pool at IANA were allocated to the regional internet registries (RIRs). Below you can find the statement I made, as (Internet Architecture Board) IAB chair, during the press conference. I am well aware that with this text I am preaching to the choir, but it is an example of the kind of evangineering that the IAB gets into now and then.
 Olaf Kolkman, IAB Chair The allocation of the final IPv4 free address blocks to the regional registries is both a significant and an insignificant event.
It is significant in that this moment has long been anticipated. The IETF, the standards organization for Internet protocols, started to work on an IPv4 successor almost 20 years ago, and IPv6 as we know it today was standardized 15 years ago and has matured ever since.
This event is insignificant in that next week the Internet will not be significantly different than it was a week ago. If we would run out of license plates there would not be any impact on our driving. Similarly, there will not be any notable short-term effects caused by the exhaustion of the IPv4 free address pool.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
IRTF Update
By Aaron Falk
What follows is a summary of the IRTF chair’s report, which was delivered during the IETF 79 technical plenary. Four of the 13 Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) research groups (RGs) met during the week:
- Scalable, Adaptive Multicast RG
- Host Identity Payload RG
- Delay Tolerant Networking RG
- Virtual Networks RG
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
ISOC Panel Weighs Power, Billing Constraints of Smartphones
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
When considering the future of the mobile Internet, network protocol experts are worried about two key issues:
- the power constraints of handheld devices and
- the high fees that carriers charge end-users for network- and application-generated events.
 istockphoto.com © Courtney Keating These two issues generated the most debate at a panel session entitled “Handheld, Wireless, and Open: Priorities for the Mobile Future Internet” that was sponsored by the Internet Society. The panel was held in Beijing on 9 November, concurrent with the IETF meeting.
Moderated by Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society, the panel considered the impact that a growing number of mobile devices and sensors will have on the Internet infrastructure.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
The Untethered Future of the Internet
By Leslie Daigle
RFC 1122: Requirements for Internet Hosts—Communication Layers and RFC 1123: Requirements for Internet Hosts—Application and Support lay out the basic, somewhat idealized, expectations of Internet hosts, circa 1989. As we look at the Internet that exists today, we can see that much has already changed from the ideal laid out in those documents, with more change to come as people increasingly use devices that can operate “untethered”—from any particular network, or fixed source of power. This article reviews the historical perspective from those documents, looks at today’s reality in comparison, and draws some conclusions about the approach to updating our notions of Internet host requirements in the face of future realities for devices and the Internet.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
Internet Society, Standards Work Draw ICT Professionals to IETF 79
Four information technology professionals from Africa, Asia, and South America attended their first IETF meeting in November 2010 as part of the Internet Society’s Fellowship to the IETF Programme. Now in its sixth year, the programme, which operates under the aegis of the Internet Society’s Next Generation Leaders Programme, enables Internet technologists from developing regions to participate more fully in the IETF’s standards work by facilitating their attendance at an IETF meeting.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
IPv4, IPv6 Coexistence Challenges Network Operators
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist on the Internet for decades, creating the need for additional transition mechanisms because the dual-stack model won’t solve all of the emerging problems for network operators.
 istockphoto.com © Andrey Prokhorov That was the consensus view of a panel of experts who discussed IPv6 operations and transitional Issues at the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) technical plenary held 8 November in Beijing.
“We’re going to have a very long transitional coexistence period,” said Danny McPherson, chief security officer at VeriSign, who moderated the panel discussion. “There’s a lot of work going on still for . . . some of the strategies for IPv4-only devices to speak to IPv6 networks where you don’t have dual stack as an option.”
Latency is a key issue that the cable company Comcast has run into during its ongoing public trials of several IPv4-to-IPv6 transition mechanisms. Comcast began its IPv6 deployment five years ago, and its network is largely dual stack, along with its back office functions and access network.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
Zero Addresses, One Solution, Two Problems
By Christian Jacquenet
The IPv4 world as we know it is coming to an end. IPv6 is the only perennial solution to global IPv4 address depletion, but transition will take several years, if not decades.
As a consequence, service providers have to deal with two distinct issues:
- The need to face the forthcoming global IPv4 address depletion, which means the introduction of IPv6 capabilities into network and service infrastructures
- The need to guarantee IPv4 service continuity during the transition period when global IPv4 addresses will become even more scarce: that is, make sure customers can still access IPv4 content from an IPv4 terminal despite the scarcity of public IPv4 addresses.
The Need for IPv4 Service Continuity
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
RPKI: One Perspective on Implementation
By Alex Band
This is an invited article to describe a specific implementation and operational perspective on a developing IETF specification, RPKI.
 istockphoto.com © Vasiliy Yakobchuk Routing on the Internet is a system that depends on every network operator working together, and in most cases working around other people’s mistakes by routing differently until the source problem is fixed. Today, the vast majority of mis-announcements are accidental originations of someone else’s prefix. But routing errors have a high customer impact because entire networks can become unreachable. In a sense, we are lucky that more problems do not occur, and we can still point to the YouTube vs. Pakistan Telecom incident as a recent example, even though that happened in early 2008. Still, there is an urgent need to make this system more robust before a routing event occurs that causes major, widespread problems.
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
Recent IESG Document and Protocol Actions
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This article was posted on 16 March 2011
Full edition in PDF format
The full edition is available here for download in PDF format
This article was posted on 16 March 2011
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