Independent Stream J. Livingood
Internet-Draft Comcast
Intended status: Informational 23 February 2025
Expires: 27 August 2025
IETF Meeting Network Recommendations
draft-livingood-meeting-network-01
Abstract
IETF participants need a highly reliable and responsive network, with
sufficient bandwidth to avoid congestion, that enables work to be
conducted without interruption or network limitation during an IETF
meeting. Such a network enables in-person network attendees to get
their work done. It also enables remote participants to have a good
experience as well, via remote participation in working group
meetings. This document makes suggestions about how to reduce
complexity, reduce cost, and increase reliability of the IETF meeting
network, which may be helpful in community discussion.
Status of This Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 27 August 2025.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Key Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Network Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Extension of IETF Network to Hotels . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
5. Wireless Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
6. Real-Time Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
7. Post-Meeting Reporting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
8. Geo-IP Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
9. Cost Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
10. Questions About Roles and Responsibilities . . . . . . . . . 5
11. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
12. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
13. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
14. Revision History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
15. Open Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
16. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1. Introduction
IETF participants need a highly reliable and responsive network, with
sufficient bandwidth to avoid congestion, that enables work to be
conducted without interruption or network limitation during an IETF
meeting. Such a network enables in-person network attendees to get
their work done. It also enables remote participants to have a good
experience as well, via remote participation in working group
meetings. This document makes suggestions about how to reduce
complexity, reduce cost, and increase reliability of the IETF meeting
network, which may be helpful in community discussion
In the past, approaches to revise network requirements started from
the point at which the IETF currently operates. This risks burdening
such an exercise with old assumptions and requirements. This
analysis, in contrast, is an idealized redesign that asks "if we were
building the IETF network from scratch today, what should it look
like?".
2. Key Requirements
REQ1: Highly reliable and performant network with no experiments
that may potentially cause disruptions to mission-critical
standards development work (e.g., working group sessions).
REQ2: Support for network experiments shall be supported via a
functionally separate Hackathon network.
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REQ3: Redundant upstream connectivity to the internet shall be
maintained, to hedge the risk of outage in case of path
failure.
REQ4: Native dual stack shall be supported for all devices on the
network - IPv4 and IPv6.
REQ5: The most-recent IEEE Wi-Fi standard shall be supported,
delivering ubiquitous Wi-Fi available in the entire meeting
venue.
REQ6: A public ticketing system shall be used to report issues, as
well as track/report status or closure to all network users.
REQ7: A public network performance dashboard and associated real-
time and post-meeting reports shall be maintained, available
to all network users.
3. Network Experiments
* Network experiments MUST only occur on the Hackathon Network,
which is a separate network form the Meeting Network.
* The Hackathon Network will run for the entirety of the IETF
meeting, not just during the Hackathon.
* Participants shall use the public ticketing system (with support
for up-voting to support prioritization) to request support for
experimental new protocols or other experiments. These requests
will thus be decided based on community feedback.
4. Extension of IETF Network to Hotels
* Hotel networks are now sufficiently performant that this is no
longer the technical limitation that it was 10 or 20 years ago; it
is time to move on.
* If there are potential issues with filtering, participants can use
a VPN (as most do anyway).
* Thus, the IETF meeting network MUST NOT be extended to hotel rooms
any longer.
* As an alternative, the IETF should contract with the primary hotel
to include free Wifi in the room rate and include network
performance requirements, such as minimum downstream and upstream
bandwidth and maximum latency.
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* In rare cases of a country-wide firewall issue, where open
internet access is not possible from the primary IETF hotel, an
alternative may be to have IETF set up an appropriate VPN headend,
privacy proxy, or other technical solution in the hotel's network
or in the IETF meeting network. Setting up such a VPN or similar
service may also save meeting attendees incremental cost or work.
5. Wireless Networks
* There shall be only one wireless network (Service Set Identifier,
SSID) for the Meeting Network: IETF
* There shall be only one wireless network (SSID) for Network
Experiments (unless a special SSID is required as part of an
experiment): IETF-Hackathon
* The wireless network shall require authentication, using the most
recent widely supported standard (e.g., WPA3 PSK with a fallback
to WPA2. This is not intended to be individually-identifying
authentication.
* If participants wish to experiment, such as doing IPv6-only
connectivity, they may be able to do so on their local host (i.e.,
to achiev IPv6-only, disable IPv4 addressing on the host) or set
something up on the hackathon network.
6. Real-Time Reporting
* All data concerning the performance of the network should be made
available transparently for all participants to see, both during
and after the meeting.
* The Network Operations Center (NOC) shall provide a real-time or
near-real-time dashboard of all key network statistics.
* Reporting using IPFIX (NetFlow) that shows the source/destination
of network flows.
* Bandwidth tracking of peak usage.
* Transport protocol tracking (e.g., volume of TCP, UDP, QUIC).
* Application protocol tracking (e.g., volume of SMTP, HTTP, etc.).
* DSCP mark tracking (e.g., volume by DSCP code point).
* ECN tracking (e.g., volume with no ECN, ECT(1), CE).
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* All aspects of Wi-Fi performance (e.g., by room, specific AP,
etc.).
7. Post-Meeting Reporting
* Within 1 week of the shut down of the network a final network
performance and incident(s) report shall be sent to the community
and posted on the IETF website.
8. Geo-IP Data
* Geo-IP data shall be updated to the next IETF meeting's location
within 1 week of the end of the prior IETF meeting, so that Geo-IP
databases pick up the change of geography well before the next
IETF meeting.
9. Cost Management
* Total meeting network cost in 2024 was roughly $850,000. At 1,000
attendees per meeting and 3 meetings per year, 851,000/3,000 =
$283 per participant for each meeting. If this cost was reduced,
it could enable a material reduction in meeting registration fees.
* Cost can be reduced by reducing complexity (see prior sections).
* One potential parallel activity could be to have an *independent*
team study these costs and make recommendations on how to reduce
them.
10. Questions About Roles and Responsibilities
* Lines of reporting may benefit from greater clarification.
* The community may want to consider asking the NOC Lead contractor
to regularly report to the IESG and IETF LLC concerning meeting
network operations.
* Should the IESG establish an community oversight mechanism for the
meeting network operations function (e.g., via GEN Area)?
11. Acknowledgements
Thank you to the following people for their feedback: Andrew Malis,
Toerles Eckert, Eric Rescorla.
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12. IANA Considerations
This memo includes no requests to or actions for IANA.
13. Security Considerations
N/A
14. Revision History
v00: First draft
v01: Changes suggested on the admin-discuss mailing list
15. Open Issues
See list (if applicable) at https://github.com/jlivingood/IETF-Mtg-
Network/issues
16. Informative References
Author's Address
Jason Livingood
Comcast
Philadelphia, PA
United States of America
Email: jason_livingood@comcast.com
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