IRTF Meeting Report for IETF-126

Sources: IETF Datatracker agendas and presentation materials; automatically generated meeting minutes. Automatic minutes may contain errors.

This is a report of the IRTF activities at IETF-126 that took place from 18 July 2026 to 24 July 2026 in Vienna. The report covers the ANRW, meetings of 14 IRTF research groups and the IRTFOPEN meeting.

Covered meetings

ANRW — ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop

Official ANRW ’26 program · Datatracker materials · Auto-minutes

Workshop summary

ANRW ’26 was a full-day workshop held on Monday of IETF-126. It brought together applied networking research across network management, security and privacy, Internet measurement, and transport and media. The program combined a keynote with peer-reviewed long and short research presentations, providing a bridge between academic work and the engineering and standards communities participating in the IETF and IRTF.

The chairs reported 61 submissions—48 long and 13 short—with 26 accepted contributions comprising 20 long and 6 short papers.

Johanna Ullrich’s keynote, The Internet — A Critical Infrastructure, examined the Internet’s transition into essential infrastructure, its geopolitical and power-grid interdependencies, and the need for more rigorous and reproducible Internet-measurement methods.

Highlighted material

• Chair slides and workshop statistics
• Keynote presentation
• Full workshop program
• All presentation material

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 07:00:00

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 09:30:00

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 12:00:00

Video recording for anrw on 2026-07-20 at 14:30:00

CFRG — Crypto Forum

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

CFRG - Crypto Forum Research Group
IETF 126 in Vienna

Wednesday July 22, 2026, 09:00-11:00 (UTC+2)

• Notes: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-cfrg

• Chairs: Alexey Melnikov, Stanislav Smyshlyaev, Nick Sullivan

Friday July 24, 2026, 11:30-12:30 (UTC+2)

• Notes: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-cfrg

• Chairs: Alexey Melnikov, Stanislav Smyshlyaev, Nick Sullivan

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-ietf-ipsecme-hybrid-kem-ikev2-frodo
• draft-irtf-cfrg-fiat-shamir
• draft-irtf-cfrg-kemeleon
• draft-irtf-cfrg-rsa-guidance
• draft-longa-cfrg-frodokem
• draft-looker-cfrg-bbs-signatures
• draft-wood-cfrg-rsa-blind-signatures

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for cfrg on 2026-07-22 at 07:00:00

Video recording for cfrg on 2026-07-24 at 09:30:00

Key discussion items

The Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG) met during IETF 126 in Vienna. The session was chaired by Alexey Melnikov and Nick Sullivan, with Stanislav Smyshlyaev participating remotely. The meeting covered administrative updates, including the renewal of the Crypto Review Panel, followed by an open discussion on Post-Quantum (PQ) Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) security considerations. Technical presentations spanned zero-knowledge proofs (Longfellow ZK), hybrid post-quantum password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE), non-separable hybrid signatures (Silithium), asynchronous remote key generation (ARKG), and compact PQ mutual authentication (PQuAKE).

A formal poll was taken regarding the adoption of hybrid PQ/T signatures.

---

Topics covered

• Admin and Document Status
• Open Discussion: PQ KEM Security Considerations
• Longfellow ZK
• Hybrid Post-Quantum Password Authenticated Key Exchange
• Silithium: A Compact, Efficient and Non-Separable Hybrid Signature
• Asynchronous Remote Key Generation (ARKG)
• PQuAKE: Compact Post-Quantum Mutual Authentication for Key Exchange

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Hybrid PAKE Draft Split: Christopher Wood will restructure the hybrid PAKE draft to separate the core cryptographic primitives (for CFRG) from the protocol-specific wire formats (for a future IETF working group / BoF) before initiating an adoption call.
• Longfellow Draft Split: The authors of the Longfellow ZK draft will coordinate with the authors of the Fiat-Shamir draft to integrate the IOP sections and refine the core scheme/parameters document.

---

Next steps

• PQ KEM Security Considerations: The chairs will compile the feedback from the session and initiate a structured discussion on the mailing list regarding the potential adoption of a general-purpose KEM guidance document.
• Hybrid PQ/T Signatures Adoption: Given the split feedback in the session poll, the chairs will take the discussion to the mailing list to determine if and how CFRG should proceed with hybrid signature schemes.
• ARKG Review: The chairs encouraged the WG to read and review draft-nygren-cfrg-arkg on the mailing list to gauge readiness for adoption.

---

GAIA — Global Access to the Internet for All

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) IRTF WG
IETF 126, Hybrid

• Date: 23 July 2026
• Time: 07:00 - 09:00 (GMT +2) 120 minutes
• Chairs: Jane Coffin, Kurtis Heimerl, Adisorn Lertsinsrubtavee
  [DataTracker]:

  Agenda

  Welcome, Agenda Bashing, Minutes taker, Note Well, other

Speakers

Additional resources

Other referenced papers and resources

• OFDS Hackathon GitHub repository
• QGIS

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for gaia on 2026-07-23 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The GAIA working group met at IETF 126 to discuss rural backhaul design, community network lifecycle modeling, human-centric methodology in networking research, open fiber data mapping tools, and operational practices for circular device management. The session featured five presentations, detailed architectural discussions on network sustainability, and updates on the group's adopted draft.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Agenda Review
• 2. Next-Generation Wireless Backhaul Design for Rural Areas
• 3. Community Networks Readiness and Maturity Model (CN-RMM)
• 4. Human Methods in Networking Research
• 5. Open Fiber Data Standard (OFDS)
• 6. Operational Practices for Digital Autonomy and Meaningful Connectivity through Circular Management of User and Network Devices

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Circular Management Draft: Leandro Navarro will prepare an updated version of the adopted working group draft (draft-ietf-gaia-operational-practices) to resolve minor issues raised during the review, including alphabetizing definitions, fixing typos, and incorporating security/operational feedback.

---

Next steps

• The working group will continue reviewing the circular device management draft on the mailing list.
• The chairs will coordinate with the Sustain group leadership during future IETF scheduling to prevent concurrent meeting times and minimize scheduling conflicts.

HRPC — Human Rights Protocol Considerations

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Human Rights Protocol Considerations (hrpc) RG
https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/hrpc/about

IETF 126, Vienna
2026-07-20, 1130-1230 local time

• Chairs: Mallory Knodel

Agenda

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-irtf-hrpc-political

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for hrpc on 2026-07-20 at 09:30:00

Key discussion items

The Human Rights Protocol Considerations (HRPC) Research Group met at IETF 126. The session was chaired by Mallory Knodel, with Laura acting as the note-taker.

The meeting featured two primary presentations:

1. Corinne Cath presented research on "CloudRift," exploring how the migration of internet governance organizations to commercial hyperscale cloud networks impacts their public interest missions and technical decentralization.
2. Tim Engelhardt from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) provided an update on technical standards and human rights, highlighting key insights from recent global consultations and upcoming institutional initiatives at the ITU-T.

The session concluded with a discussion on how the HRPC community can better engage the broader IETF to translate human rights considerations into protocol design.

---

Topics covered

• Administrative and Draft Status Updates
• CloudRift: The Impact of Hyperscale Cloud on Internet Governance Organizations
• Technical Standards and Human Rights: OHCHR Update

Conclusions and next steps

Next steps

• Mailing List Discussion: Mallory Knodel and Carolina Caeiro will initiate a thread on the HRPC mailing list to gather ideas on how the research group can more effectively engage the broader IETF on protocol-level human rights considerations.
• Document Access: Follow up on obtaining and sharing the ITU-T human rights checklist contribution through existing IETF/ITU-T sharing agreements.

ICCRG — Internet Congestion Control

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

ICCRG Research Group Agenda - IETF 126
Time and Date
Wednesday July 22, 09:00-11:00 CEST
Location: Park Suite 7
IETF Agenda Link
Links
Meeting chat

Notes

Minutes

Administrivia

Blue sheets / scribe selection / NOTE WELL
Agenda revision

Presentations

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-ietf-tsvwg-fq-pie
• draft-irtf-iccrg-ledbat-plus-plus

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for iccrg on 2026-07-22 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The ICCRG session at IETF 126 featured updates on active research group drafts, reports on congestion control implementations from the IETF 126 Hackathon, and presentations on novel congestion control algorithms and queue management systems. The discussions spanned transport pacing specifications, cumulative SACK extensions for RDMA, queueing-theoretic congestion control updates, disaggregated architectures for LLM inference, and approximate performance isolation mechanisms for heterogeneous network environments.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Welcome, Status, and Chair Slides
• 2. Pacing in Transport Protocols
• 3. Windowless Cumulative SACK Extension for RDMA Retransmission
• 4. Testing Congestion Control and Queue Management Mechanisms - IETF 126 Hackathon Update
• 5. Using a Little’s-Law-Based Queueing-Theoretic Approach for Congestion-Window Updates
• 6. Mooncake - Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Inference
• 7. Managing Congestion Control Heterogeneity on the Internet with Approximate Performance Isolation

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Decision: draft-irtf-iccrg-pacing-02 will proceed to Working Group Last Call (WGLC). Simone Ferlin to initiate the last call on the ICCRG mailing list.

---

Next steps

• QTSDR evaluation: Ndumiso Gasela to publish the NS-3 implementation of QTSDR on GitHub for community testing, particularly focusing on heterogeneous coexistence and network jitter.
• Congestion Control Evaluation Suite: Mohit P. Tahiliani to continue the development of an RFC 9743-compliant congestion control test suite in NS-3 and report back at a future meeting.

ICNRG — Information-Centric Networking

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

ICNRG@IETF126 Agenda

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• ICN-Enabled Adaptive In-Network Computation for Resilient Distributed AI
• ietf126-icnrg-draft-liu-icnrg-cross-domain-compute-discovery-00-slides

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-mosko-icnrg-ccnxchunking

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for icnrg on 2026-07-22 at 14:00:00

Key discussion items

The ICNRG (Information-Centric Networking Research Group) met at IETF 126. The session was co-chaired by Dave Oran and Ryo Yanagida. The meeting featured updates on active research group drafts, followed by six technical research presentations covering ICN integration with SCION, distributed AI computation, routing scalability, NDN access control, and cross-domain compute discovery.

Topics covered

• 1. RG Status and Administration
• 2. ICN+SCION: A Global Name-Based Network Service
• 3. ICN-Enabled Adaptive In-Network Computation for Resilient Distributed AI
• 4. From Map-and-Encap to BIER: Observations on Network Routing Scalability
• 5. Architecting A Scalable Routing System for Named Data Networking
• 6. Open-Source Decentralized Access Control Library for NDN
• 7. Cross-Domain Compute Discovery

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Flick Draft: Authors committed to issuing an updated draft before the IETF 127 meeting in November.
• Interim Meeting Planning: The chairs will poll the mailing list regarding holding an online interim meeting in mid-to-late September to address postponed topics and advance active drafts (including FLIC and the versioning draft).
• NDN Updates: Lixia Zhang committed to posting NDN project updates and coordination announcements more regularly to the ICNRG and ndn-interest mailing lists to improve community synchronization.

---

Next steps

• CCNX Chunking: Move to final publication once the outstanding IRSG administrative review comments are resolved.
• Versioning Draft: Solicit more community reviews on the mailing list to prepare draft-ietf-icnrg-versioning for a future last call.
• Compute Discovery: Encourage discussion on the mailing list regarding the requirements outlined in draft-liu-icnrg-cross-domain-compute-discovery-00.

IRTFOPEN — IRTF Open Meeting

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

IRTFOPEN Meetings at IETF-126
Thursday, 2026-07-23 12:00-14:00 UTC

• Chairs: Dirk Kutscher
  Agenda and

  Presentations

  Notes

  IETF-126 Agenda
  About
  The Applied Networking Research Prize
  (ANRP) is awarded to recognise the best
  recent results in applied networking, interesting new research ideas of
  potential relevance to the Internet standards community, and upcoming
  people that are likely to have an impact on Internet standards and
  technologies, with a particular focus on cases where these people or
  ideas would not otherwise get much exposure or be able to participate in
  the discussion.
  IRTFOPEN Agenda

Speaker bios

Rumaisa Habib

Rumaisa Habib is a 4th year PhD candidate
under the supervision of Zakir Durumeric in the Empirical Security
Research Group at Stanford University. Rumaisa’s primary research focus
is on large scale measurement studies to understand the web beyond the
Western context, and building systems to allow researchers conduct these
studies more efficiently.

Diwen Xue

Diwen Xue is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong
Kong (CUHK). Before joining CUHK, he was a Research Fellow at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research sits at the intersection
of Security & Privacy and Systems & Networks, seeking to understand how
network adversaries behave and to build practical defenses for an
increasingly adversarial Internet. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan and his B.A. from New York University. His work
has been recognized by several awards, including the Internet Defense
Prize and the USENIX Security Distinguished Paper award. His current
research interests include Internet measurement; Traffic analysis &
Obfuscation; and Privacy-enhancing Technologies (PETS).

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for irtfopen on 2026-07-23 at 12:00:00

Key discussion items

The IRTF Open (IRTFOPEN) session at IETF 126 was chaired by Dirk Kutscher. The session featured administrative updates, the formal promotion of two research groups, and presentations from the recipients of the Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP): Rumaisa Habib and Diwen Xue. The session concluded with an update and discussion on the "Networking for AI" side meeting held earlier that week.

---

Topics covered

• 1. IRTF Chair Updates
• 2. Formalizing Dependence of Web Infrastructure
• Discussion & Comments:
• 3. Fingerprinting Deep Packet Inspection Devices by Their Ambiguities
• Discussion & Comments:
• 4. Side Meeting Update: Networking for AI
• Discussion & Comments:

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Research Group Promotions: The proposed research groups sustain (Sustainability) and space (Space Networking) have officially been promoted to active, regular IRTF research groups.

---

Next steps

• Networking for AI Workshop: The second IRTF-associated workshop on Networking for AI will take place at the CoNEXT conference in December 2024.
• Kuala Lumpur Travel Grants: The application cycle for diversity travel grants for IETF 128 (Kuala Lumpur) is scheduled to open in late November 2024.
• AI Group Scoping: The IRTF will continue to refine the scope and gauge community interest for a potential new research group focused on Networking for AI.

MAPRG — Measurement and Analysis for Protocols

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

IRTF maprg agenda for IETF-126 (Vienna)

• Date: Thursday, 23 July 2026, Session IV 16:30-18:30
  IRTF Note Well: https://irtf.org/policies/irtf-note-well-2019-11.pdf

  Agenda

Abstracts

Heads-up Talk: Towards a Common Measurement Framework for Large-Scale libp2p Deployments using CBOR-based Verifiable Telemetry

• Authors: Johanna Moran, Manu Sheel Gupta Abstract:
  Large-scale peer-to-peer systems have evolved from experimental research prototypes into critical Internet infrastructure supporting decentralized storage, content distribution, blockchain consensus, and increasingly autonomous agent-based applications. Networks such as Ethereum, IPFS, Filecoin, Celestia, and other decentralized ecosystems collectively operate hundreds of thousands of nodes across heterogeneous network environments, making them valuable real-world laboratories for protocol measurement and analysis.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Heads-up talk: Measuring OAuth in MCP: Migration from DCR to CIMD

• Authors: Paul Craleton Abstract:
  The Model Context Protocol (MCP) connects AI applications to third-party servers using OAuth 2.1, and its authorization model has driven real-world deployments of open dynamic client onboarding. This talk presents measurement data from this transition across the MCP ecosystem. We show the relative adoption of CIMD versus DCR over time, and compare token refresh success rates between clients using each mechanism, quantifying the user-visible reliability cost of client record purging under DCR.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Feeding the Crawlers: An Experiment in Deliberate Bot Attraction

• Authors: Dan Silvers Abstract:
  As AI training pipelines grow hungrier for fresh data, the crawlers feeding them have grown increasingly aggressive — creating a meaningful measurement problem. We present ACPWB.com , a fictitious company website designed to attract, classify, and measure AI crawler activity through an abundance of synthetic content. This short talk presents the methodology and preliminary findings from this grand experiment, along with some ideas for future exploration.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
A Browser's Perspective: Surprises and Insights from Firefox Networking Telemetry

• Authors: Oskar Mansfeld Abstract:
  Firefox collects anonymized networking telemetry from 200 million monthly active users. A large share of these measurements is directly relevant to maprg and the IETF: congestion control behavior, dns timings, path and connection characteristics, QUIC adoption, protocol evolution and distribution, happy-eyeballs-v3 performance, and more.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Traceroutes

• Authors: Sebastian Kappes (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), Tobias Fiebig (TU Wien), Anja Feldmann (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), Johannes Zirngibl (Max Planck Institute for Informatics) Abstract:
  Traceroute is an important Internet measurement tool used to infer the Internet’s topology and to identify middleboxes. However, we show that TTL jumps exist on the Internet: some devices rewrite the TTL, often to larger value of up to 255. Based on controlled experiments and public data from RIPE Atlas and CAIDA Ark, we show that at least 47 ASes are impacted by path-impairing devices that rewrite the TTL.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Measuring Deployment Characteristics of Post-Quantum TLS Authentication Mechanisms

• Authors: Nalini Elkins Abstract:
  The transition to post-quantum cryptography introduces multiple deployment choices for TLS authentication, including traditional X.509 certificates using ML-DSA, Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC), and other emerging mechanisms. While the cryptographic properties of these approaches are relatively well understood, there is comparatively little operational evidence to help architects evaluate their practical deployment implications. This presentation describes an active measurement methodology for evaluating post-quantum TLS deployments.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Understanding DNS Dynamics over the Starlink Network

• Authors: Robert Richter, Vaibhav Bajpai (Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam) Abstract:
  Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks have as a viable Internet connectivity option, yet their Domain Name System (DNS) behavior remains largely unexplored. This paper presents the first dedicated measurement study of DNS performance in the Starlink network. Our measurements reveal that DNS latency in Starlink is predominantly determined by the satellite hop rather than terrestrial routing, with the CGNAT hop (100.64.0.1) accounting for approximately 69 % of total latency in traceroute measurements.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
The Future of DNS Privacy: A Comparison of DNS over QUIC and DNS over HTTP/3.

• Authors: Newton Masinde Abstract:
  Abstract: This study presents a large-scale empirical analysis of DNS-over-Encryption (DoE) protocols, focusing on the adoption, protocol feature support, and impact on webpage loading performance. We conducted measurements across over three thousand DoE resolvers, characterizing their support for features such as session resumption and 0-Round-trip Time (RTT) in DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) and DNS-over-HTTP/3 (DoH/3). Our extensive latency measurements demonstrate that both protocols perform comparably, with DoQ slightly outperforming on average.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Detecting and Characterizing Exposed BGP Routers

• Authors: Shyam Krishna Khadka (University of Twente), Suzan Bayhan (University of Twente), Ralph Holz (University of Twente, University of Münster), Cristian Hesselman (University of Twente, SURF) Abstract:
  RFC 7454 on BGP operations and security recommends that network operators restrict access to TCP port 179, which routers use to receive reachability messages from their peers. This paper presents a detailed insight into this underexplored problem of exposed BGP routers using an Internet-wide TCP scan of port 179. We identify 141,313 IP addresses that accept TCP connections and exchange OPEN messages, corresponding to 20,432 routers across 4,194 Autonomous Systems (ASes).

Read the full abstract in the agenda.
Noisy Routers: Investigating the Make-Up of Route Collector Data

• Authors: Ebrima Jaw (University of Twente) Abstract:
  The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a crucial inter-domain routing protocol that uses update messages to enable Autonomous Systems (ASes) to share network reachability information. We identify and characterize high-frequency repeated updates driven by a small fraction of sessions and prefixes.

Read the full abstract in the agenda.

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-ietf-oauth-client-id-metadata-document

Other referenced papers and resources

• https://blog.apnic.net/2026/04/16/noisy-routers-investigating-the-make-up-of-route-collector-data/
• https://dl.ifip.org/db/conf/cnsm/cnsm2025/1571167978.pdf
• https://irtf.org/policies/irtf-note-well-2019-11.pdf
• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-18268-5_10
• https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3705389_1/component/file_3705390/content
• https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/538780291/Exposed_BGP_routers.pdf
• https://robert-richter.me/pdfs/starlink-dns-dynamics-poster.pdf
• https://robert-richter.me/pdfs/starlink-dns-dynamics-presentation.pdf
• https://robert-richter.me/pdfs/starlink-dns-dynamics.pdf
• https://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/2026-pam-doq-doh3.pdf

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for maprg on 2026-07-23 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Measurement and Analysis for Protocols Research Group (MAPRG) met at IETF 126. The session was chaired by Dave Plonka and Mirja Kühlewind. It featured ten rapid-fire technical presentations spanning decentralized telemetry, OAuth migrations, crawler traffic dynamics, browser telemetry, routing anomalies, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) deployment, satellite network performance, encrypted DNS protocols, BGP exposures, and BGP routing data quality.

No formal consensus polls were conducted during this session.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Administrative Updates
• 2. Towards a Common Measurement Framework for Large-Scale libp2p Deployments Using CBOR-Based Verifiable Telemetry
• 3. Measuring OAuth in MCP: Migration from DCR to CIMD
• 4. Feeding the Crawlers: An Experiment in Deliberate Bot Attraction
• 5. A Browser's Perspective: Surprises and Insights from Firefox Networking Telemetry
• 6. TTL Jumps
• 7. Measuring Deployment Characteristics of Post-Quantum TLS Authentication Mechanisms
• 8. Understanding DNS Performance over the Starlink Network
• 9. The Future of DNS Privacy: A Comparison of DNS over QUIC and DNS over HTTP/3
• 10. Detecting and Characterizing Exposed BGP Routers
• 11. Noisy Routers: Investigating the Make-Up of Route Collector Data

Conclusions and next steps

Next steps

• PQC Handshake Testing: Nalini Elkins and collaborators will set up test websites to allow enterprise network administrators to measure handshake overheads with various PQC signature algorithm combinations.
• Encrypted DNS Resolution Methodology: The authors of the DNS Privacy study (Newton et al.) will refine their analysis to differentiate recursive from authoritative resolvers and focus on production-grade resolvers.
• Starlink Peering/Transit Studies: The satellite routing community will continue investigating terrestrial egress bottlenecks to help optimize anycast resolver placement near satellite ground stations.

NMRG — Network Management

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

NMRG 88th meeting
IETF 126, Vienna + Online
2026-07-24 09:00-11:00 CEST
RG Chairs

• Jérôme François
• Jéferson Campos Nobre
  RG Secretaries
• Pedro Martinez-Julia
• Xiaohui Xie
  Useful links:
• Materials: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/session/nmrg
• Notes: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-nmrg
• Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/user/ietf/playlists (available post-meeting)
  

  Agenda

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• draft-cxxx-nmrg-ai4ibn-00
• draft-janz-nmrg-naas-agentic-negotiation
• draft-nmop-cui-nkg-gateway-00
• draft-prabhu-nmrg-prompt-schema-llm-00
• draft-wmz-nmrg-agent-ndt-arch-04

Other referenced papers and resources

• GIFT-Eval
• time-series-model

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for nmrg on 2026-07-24 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The Network Management Research Group (NMRG) met at IETF 126. The session focused heavily on the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs), autonomous agents, network digital twins (NDTs), and automated intent-based network management. The group discussed several active internet-drafts and research presentations covering self-supervised closed loops, transformer-based anomaly detection, ontology reconciliation, agentic conflict resolution, intelligent data planes, prompt normalization schemas, and network knowledge graphs.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Administration
• 2. Autosupervised Automation Loop System for Cloud-Native Infrastructures
• 3. Building an Intelligent Network @SURF
• 4. Ontology Reconciliation
• 5. Inter-Agent Conflict Resolution
• 6. NaaS Agentic Negotiation
• 7. Agentic AI for Intent-Based Networking
• 8. Intelligent Data Plane (IDP) Framework
• 9. Normalizing Multi-Vendor Network Inputs for LLM-Assisted Network Management
• 10. Network Digital Twin (NDT) Agent Architecture
• 11. Network Knowledge Graph Gateway

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Feedback on Drafts: The Co-Chairs called for increased community feedback on the mailing list for all presented drafts, specifically:
  • draft-wmz-nmrg-agent-ndt-arch (following the presenter's request for Research Group adoption).
  • draft-prabhu-nmrg-prompt-schema-llm.
  • draft-xu-nmrg-idp-framework.

---

Next steps

• AI Ops Mailing List Coordination: Participants interested in Agentic AI, prompt schemas, and ontology reconciliation (including Christopher Janz, Shailesh Prabhu, Laurent Ciavaglia, and Alexander Clemm) will utilize the newly established AI Ops mailing list to coordinate cross-group activities and align agent architectures across NMRG, ANIMA, and NMOP.
• IBN and Autonomic Networking Collaboration: Alexander Clemm and Toerless Eckert will continue seeking practical use cases and industry implementations to incorporate into draft-cxxx-nmrg-ai4ibn.

PANRG — Path Aware Networking RG

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Path Aware Networking Research Group (PANRG) Agenda IETF 126
Tue 21 Jul 2026 - 16:30-18:00 CEST (14:30-16:00 UTC) - Vienna

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for panrg on 2026-07-21 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Path Aware Networking Research Group (PANRG) met at IETF 120 in Vienna, Austria. The session was co-chaired by Jen Linkova and Brian Trammell. Note-taking was led by Ryo Yanagida and Nicola Rustignoli.

The meeting featured presentations on Autonomous System (AS) security profiles and a series of updates on SCION-related research, including the status of the core SCION specification drafts in the Independent Submission (IS) stream, Multipath QUIC over SCION, TCP/IPv6 to Multipath TCP (MPTCP) translation over SCION, and Tailscale integration with SCION. The session concluded with an open floor discussion regarding the future charter and direction of PANRG.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Welcome, Administration, and Agenda Bash
• 2. Suggestions for AS Security Profiles for Secure and Resilient Internet Paths
• 3. SCION Specification - IS Process Feedback and Future Work
• 4. Guidelines for QUIC Multipath over SCION — Updates
• 5. Bridging the Gap: Translating TCP/IPv6 to MPTCP/SCION
• 6. Tailscale over SCION
• 7. Future of PANRG Charter and Direction Discussion

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• Mailing List Discussion on Charter: The group agreed to transition the scoping and charter discussion to the PANRG mailing list (panrg@irtf.org).
• Action Item: Dave Oran to post his three proposed research questions (Traffic Engineering vs. Endpoint Control, Path Explosion/Equivalence Classes, and Coordinated Action Constraints) to the mailing list.
• Action Item: Colin Perkins to post his feedback regarding drawing a clear boundary between path/traffic properties and user-identity properties to the mailing list.

---

Next steps

• Co-chairs will synthesize the mailing list feedback to draft a potential updated charter for PANRG.
• PANRG will meet at IETF 121 in San Francisco, with several presentations already proposed for the agenda.

PEARG — Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Research Group

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Research Group (PEARG) Agenda - IETF 126
Time and Date
Tuesday 21st Jul, 16:30-18:00 CEST (Tuesday 21st Jul 2026 14:30-16:00 UTC)
IETF Agenda Link
Links
Meeting chat

Notes

Minutes

Blue sheets / scribe selection / NOTE WELL
Update on draft-li-pearg-ciphertext-inference-tool-mcp

Additional resources

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-hardt-email-verification
• draft-li-pearg-ciphertext-inference-tool-mcp

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for pearg on 2026-07-21 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Privacy Enhancing Technologies Research Group (PEARG) session at IETF 126 focused on the modern landscape of online tracking, automated de-anonymization, and emerging architectural privacy challenges. The session featured administrative updates regarding a MASQUE-related draft, followed by three main presentations:

1. Real-Time Bidding (RTB) privacy and security implications.
2. Large-scale online de-anonymization using Large Language Models (LLMs).
3. Client source IP privacy in a post-Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) world.

---

Topics covered

• Chair Updates and Administrative Topics
• Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Privacy
• Discussion:
• Large-Scale Online De-anonymization with LLMs
• Discussion:
• Source Privacy Post-ECH

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• MASQUE Ciphertext Inference Draft: The authors will revise and split the draft. PEARG will adopt the portion containing the privacy analysis and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) applicability evaluation once it is resubmitted.
• Source Privacy Mailing List Thread: The chairs will initiate a dedicated discussion on the PEARG mailing list to scope future research on client source privacy (post-ECH) and determine how specific architectural proposals fit into the group's charter.

---

Next steps

• Community Engagement: Members are encouraged to share "blue sky" ideas on the mailing list regarding community-driven defensive tools to counter LLM-based OSINT and RTB tracking.
• Workshop Proposal: Chairs will gather feedback on the mailing list regarding interest in a specialized workshop covering hyperscaler and AI-driven threats to anonymity.

QIRG — Quantum Internet Research Group

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Agenda

Additional details

1. Administrivia (5 min):

Resolving any online issues

RG update

2. draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture

Abstract : draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture

3. draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch

Abstract : An update on the draft proposing a framework for integrating Quantum Internet services with the current Internet, which the authors believe is close to get ready for last call. The new version includes the introduction of the QUI concept, bridging the gap between the quantum fabric and the service strata, and analysis of how a number of relevant papers in the literature would map to the proposed framework.

4. Building a hybrid infrastructure, combining real and emulated resources

Abstract : We introduce the results regarding hybrid systems, and how they can be used to experiment with service concepts at scale. The current results are basically related to QKD, given the availability of such devices, but there are plans to extend these experiments beyond, as entanglement fabric devices become available.

5. Beyond-QKD Applications of Quantum Networks

Abstract : While quantum memories remain a significant technological frontier, estimated to be a decade away from practical commercialization and deployment, many countries — including most EU member states — are actively deploying long-distance quantum key distribution (QKD) networks using commercially available hardware. This raises an important question: what other applications can leverage the prepare-and-measure or entanglement-generating quantum network hardware built for QKD?

In this talk we will present a literature review including a comprehensive compilation of quantum network applications beyond-QKD that do not rely on quantum memories; each with accessible descriptions, clear hardware requirements, and explicit statements on achievable quantum advantage. We aim to start a conversation between researchers and operators about emerging use cases and deployment pathways for existing quantum technologies.

For more information, see: https://knowledge-bank-972a03.gitlab.io/beyond-qkd/ .

6. EuroQCI standardisation

Abstract : We discuss (upcoming) standardisation efforts for the European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI).

7. draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp

Abstract : draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• Exploring hybrid environments to scale quantum-safe networks

Other referenced papers and resources

• https://knowledge-bank-972a03.gitlab.io/beyond-qkd/

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for qirg on 2026-07-21 at 12:00:00

Key discussion items

The Quantum Internet Research Group (QIRG) met at IETF 126 to discuss active research drafts, emulated environments, and near-term quantum networking applications and standardization. The agenda covered updates on three active research group drafts (draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch, draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture, and draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp), alongside presentations on near-term applications beyond Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), hybrid emulation environments, and the European EuroQCI standardization efforts.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Introduction and Status Update
• 2. Beyond QKD Applications of Near-Term Quantum Networks
• 3. Multiplane Architecture
• 4. Exploring Hybrid Environments to Scale Quantum-Safe Networks
• 5. Quantum Native Architecture
• 6. EuroQCI Standardization
• 7. Quantum Datagram Control Protocol (QDCP)

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch: The chairs determined that the draft is not yet ready for Working Group Last Call (WGLC) due to the significant volume of recent additions.
  • Action Item: Diego Lopez and co-authors to address feedback regarding the "forwarding" terminology, QoS classifications, and optical transport phrasing in a forthcoming -03 revision.
• draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture:
  • Action Item: Sara Mansouri and co-authors to prepare version -02, focusing on refining definitions of boundaries, clarifying classical signaling roles, and addressing feedback from Rodney Van Meter.
• draft-zhu-qirg-qdcp:
  • Action Item: Nevan and Mitel Misra to investigate alternative encoding options (e.g., extensible TLVs), implement IPv6 compatibility, and address protocol formatting feedback on the mailing list.

---

Next steps

• Mailing List: Detailed discussions on the architectural drafts (draft-irtf-qirg-qi-multiplane-arch and draft-cacciapuoti-qirg-quantum-native-architecture) will continue on the mailing list.
• Upcoming Meetings: Active work on the individual drafts is expected to produce updates before the next meeting cycles (IETF 127 in San Francisco / IETF 128 in Kuala Lumpur).

RASPRG — Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes Research Group

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

IETF 126: RASPRG Session
Research and Analysis of Standard-Setting Processes Research Group

• Time: 16:30–18:30
• Chairs: Ignacio Castro, Alvaro Retana
  

  Tentative Agenda

Abstracts and bios

Mark Nottingham — Cloudflare

AI in Standards Participation

Abstract

AI is increasingly used to research, write, and implement Internet standards — and, increasingly, to participate in standards discourse itself. As an assistive technology, it can lower barriers for those facing language or other obstacles. However, it also makes it easy to participate with limited human effort or understanding, straining a community whose value rests on a finite pool of expert attention.
This talk demonstrates ietf-llm , a tool for querying a working group’s or research group’s public record, and uses it to ground a discussion of where AI helps participation, where it harms it, and what norms the IETF and IRTF might adopt in response.

Speaker bio

Mark Nottingham works on Internet and Web standards at Cloudflare. He is a long-time contributor to the IETF and a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).

Jaime Jiménez — Ericsson

Analyzing AI Usage in IETF Drafts

Abstract

Forthcoming.

Speaker bio

Jaime Jiménez is a Master Researcher at Ericsson with over 15 years of experience in IoT and Web technologies. He co-chairs the IETF CoRE Working Group, contributing to the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and the device management protocol LwM2M. He is currently developing autonomous generative AI agents, enhancing their reasoning and integration with Web/IoT APIs and real-time data.
Related link: ietf.jaime.win/is-it-ai

Marcelo Santos — Federal Institute of Sertão Pernambucano

From Draft to RFC: Mapping the Mortality of Internet-Drafts across the IETF and IRTF

Abstract

It is well known that most Internet-Drafts never become RFCs. This talk shares early, work-in-progress findings from a study that looks at where in the process drafts tend to stall, using the IETF Datatracker to reconstruct each draft’s lifecycle, including its outcome, authors, affiliations, geography, and process history.
So far, the results suggest that a draft’s fate is shaped largely at one key point: Working Group adoption. Some patterns that appear clear in simple comparisons, such as differences by region, by area, or between the IETF and IRTF, seem to change once adoption is taken into account.
These are preliminary observations rather than firm conclusions, and the analysis is still being refined. The aim of the talk is to share the approach and initial signals, gather feedback, and discuss what they might mean for lowering barriers to entry.

Speaker bio

Marcelo Santos is a Professor and Researcher at the Federal Institute of Sertão Pernambucano, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco, with part of his doctoral research carried out at the IBISC Lab, Université d’Évry, France. His work focuses on Internet measurement, community networks, innovation ecosystems, IoT, and applied artificial intelligence. He has been involved in initiatives related to digital inclusion, rural connectivity, and technology-based innovation.

İlke İlhan — RIPE NCC

Community Vitality through RIPE Mailing Lists

Abstract

RIPE mailing lists have been active for over 30 years and have been one of the main communication channels for the RIPE community and the RIPE NCC membership. This analysis looks into mailing list traffic over time, the concentration of participation, the longevity of contributors, and the role of the most popular mailing lists in overall discussion.
The results reflect long-term engagement within the RIPE community and RIPE NCC membership, as seen through the mailing lists.

Speaker bio

İlke İlhan is a Business Data Analyst at the RIPE NCC. Her work focuses primarily on the RIPE NCC membership and the RIPE community.

Colin Perkins — University of Glasgow

Analysing Internet Standards Development Organisation Data
Draft
draft-perkins-analysing-sdo-data

Abstract

This document outlines issues to consider when studying data relating to the Internet standards development ecosystem. It identifies observable components of standards development processes, proposes a taxonomy of possible measurements, and highlights methodological, interpretive, and ethical considerations.
The draft is intended to support a range of uses, including monitoring standards development organisations, evaluating the evolution of technical work, understanding technology deployment, and informing community, leadership, and governance discussions.

Speaker bio

Colin Perkins is a Professor at the University of Glasgow. His research interests are in transport protocols, with a particular focus on transport and signalling for real-time and interactive multimedia, and on improving the way network protocols are designed, implemented, specified, and standardised. He has been active in the IETF and IRTF since 1996, has chaired the AVT, MMUSIC, and RMCAT working groups in the IETF, and served as IRTF Chair from 2019 to 2025. He received his BEng in Electronic Engineering in 1992 and his PhD in 1996, both from the University of York.

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• 3_Marcello_Santos

Other referenced papers and resources

• mailing-list-ai-check

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for rasprg on 2026-07-23 at 14:30:00

Key discussion items

The Research Analysis Standardization Processes Research Group (RASPRG) met at IETF 126. The session focused heavily on the impact and measurement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in SDOs, statistical analyses of Internet-Draft lifecycles and community mail archives (RIPE and IETF), and a proposed framework for analyzing data across SDOs. The chairs proposed holding an interim meeting to further explore the policy and technical implications of AI in standards participation, which received strong support from the room.

Topics covered

• Welcome and Introduction
• AI in Standards Participation
• Measuring AI Authorship of IETF Drafts
• Mortality of Internet Drafts
• Community Vitality through RIPE Mailing Lists
• Analysing Internet Standards Data

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

Session Polls

A poll was conducted to gauge interest in holding an interim meeting on AI's impact on the IETF.

• Poll 1: Interested in an AI Interim?
  • Yes: 21
  • No: 0
  • No opinion: 3
  • Total: 61

Action Items

• Chairs to take the AI Interim proposal to the RASPRG mailing list to coordinate dates, agenda topics, and speakers for a virtual interim session.
• Chairs to initiate a mailing list thread regarding the potential adoption of the SDO data analysis draft presented by Colin Perkins.

Next steps

• Community members are encouraged to contribute to Mark Nottingham's LLM skill files and Jaime Jimenez's draft analyzer.
• Further discussion on data cleaning methodologies and tracking cross-platform communication (e.g., GitHub, Slack) to occur on the RASPRG mailing list.

SPACE — Systems and Protocol Aspects for Circumstellar Environments

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

Agenda

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for space on 2026-07-21 at 09:00:00

Key discussion items

The proposed SPACE Research Group (SPACE RG) met at IETF 126 to discuss long-term research challenges and architectures for space-based and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). The session was chaired by Yorgos, with support from Nishanth Sastry. The agenda included four invited technical presentations and two group work updates.

Key topics addressed included the exponential growth of planned low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations, real-world uplink constraints and neighbor contention on LEO networks, the specific communication and computing needs of industrial NTN use cases, and routing protocol scalability in highly dynamic space topologies. The group also reviewed draft updates detailing a standard code notation for describing satellite constellations and a comprehensive taxonomy of space research tools and infrastructures.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Administration and Introduction
• 2. Beyond Starlink: Understanding the Coming Waves of LEO Satellite Deployments
• 3. The Limitations of LEO Uplink
• 4. Industrial Communication Services via Non-Terrestrial Networks: Requirements and Challenges
• 5. Towards Standardized Routing for LEO Satellite Networks: A Comparative Study
• 6. Draft update: A Code to Describe Satellite Constellations
• 7. Draft update: A Typology of Space Research Infrastructures

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• No formal standardization or consensus decisions were made, in line with the group's status as a proposed Research Group (RG).

---

Next steps

1. Constellation Notation Draft: The authors of draft-piraux-space-constellation-code invite community feedback on the CDDL schemas and general taxonomy on GitHub or the SPACE mailing list.
2. Space Typology Draft: Nishanth Sastry and Juan A. Fraire will publish the initial draft of the space research infrastructure typology on the mailing list and invite researchers to review and submit pull requests to populate the tool registry.
3. Interim Meeting: The Chairs plan to organize a virtual interim meeting in the fall (separate from the scheduled IETF meetings) to continue technical discussions. Details will be announced on the mailing list.

SUSTAIN — Sustainability and the Internet

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

SUSTAIN RG Agenda -- IETF 126 (Vienna & Online)
Datatracker: https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/sustain/about/
ICS: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/session/35566.ics
SUSTAIN RG session: THURSDAY, 23 July, 2026 -- Session I

• When: 09:00 - 11:00 Vienna (09:00 - 11:00 UTC)
• Chairs: Ali Rezaki, Eve Schooler, Michael Welzl
• Materials: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/session/sustain
  Note taking: https://notes.ietf.org/notes-ietf-126-sustain
• Chat: https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/sustain
• Recording: (YouTube available post session)
  REMINDER to Presenters: the duration times include Q&A

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• Report from Passau workshop - part 1
• Report from Passau workshop - part 2 (Dirk Kutscher)

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for sustain on 2026-07-23 at 07:00:00

Key discussion items

The SUSTAIN (Sustainability at the Internet) Research Group met at IETF 126. This session marked its transition from a proposed research group to an officially approved IRTF Research Group. The meeting featured presentations on carbon-aware DNS server selection, flow-level network carbon footprint measurements, dynamic frequency scaling for network switches, environmental dimensions beyond carbon, and a proposed "sustainability" well-known URI. The session concluded with a comprehensive report from the pre-IETF Passau workshop, which investigated the intersection of the Internet and the electricity grid.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Welcome and RG Status Update
• 2. Leveraging DNS for Carbon Aware Server Selection
• 3. From Measurement to Emissions: Assessing the Carbon Footprint of Traffic Flows
• 4. NetFridgeS: Enabling Dynamic Frequency Scaling on Network Switches through Carbon-Aware Routing
• 5. Draft Beyond Carbon
• 6. The 'sustainability' Well-Known URI - draft-besleaga-sustainability-wellknown
• 7. Report from Passau Workshop

Conclusions and next steps

Conclusions / decisions

• RG Status: The SUSTAIN Research Group is officially approved by the IRTF (moving from "proposed" status).
• Librarian Appointment: Hesham El Bakoury is designated as the official RG Librarian.
• Beyond Carbon Draft (draft-knodel-eimpact-beyond-carbon): Authors will update the draft to incorporate concrete research directions and questions to align with the research mandate of the SUSTAIN RG. Laura Soares will contribute Global South perspective citations.
• Well-Known URI Draft (draft-besleaga-sustainability-wellknown): Determined to be an engineering standard rather than a research document. The author will pivot the draft toward the Independent Submission Stream or the GREEN Working Group, and investigate Yang modeling.

---

Next steps

• Passau Workshop Report: The workshop organizers will compile and publish a formal workshop report.
• Passau Workshop Slides: The chairs will upload the workshop presentation slides to the SUSTAIN website/wiki.
• Mailing List Discussions: Technical discussions on carbon-aware DNS, flow-level metrics, and the environmental impacts beyond carbon will continue on the SUSTAIN mailing list.

T2TRG — Thing-to-Thing

Datatracker session · Agenda · Auto-minutes

Agenda

T2TRG face-to-face/hybrid summary meeting at IETF 126, Vienna.
Planned scope: the role of IETF IoT technologies in enabling AI agent interaction with IoT environments.
Draft agenda:

Latest agenda at https://github.com/t2trg/2026-ietf126/tree/main#draft-agenda

Additional resources

Unmatched presentation material

• DAWN BoF
• corneo-sildes

Other relevant Internet-Drafts

• draft-irtf-t2trg-secure-bootstrapping
• draft-lynn-t2trg-model-rest-apis
• draft-mattsson-t2trg-amplification-attacks
• draft-t2trg-idevid-considerations

Other referenced papers and resources

• https://github.com/t2trg/2026-ietf126/tree/main#draft-agenda

Official IETF YouTube recordings

Video recording for t2trg on 2026-07-20 at 12:00:00

Key discussion items

The Thing-to-Thing Research Group (T2TRG) met at IETF 126 to discuss the role of IETF IoT technologies in enabling AI agent interactions with IoT environments. The session covered administrative updates, active drafts, and five main presentations focusing on two key themes: discovery mechanisms for AI agents and enhancements to the device interaction stack (specifically CoAP and SDF). The meeting concluded with an invited, thought-provoking presentation on the systemic risks and complexities introduced by relying on AI-driven abstraction layers in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.

---

Topics covered

• 1. Administrivia & Document Status
• 2. DAWN BoF: Discovery of Agent Workloads & Named Entities
• 3. A Survey of AI Agent Discovery Mechanisms
• 4. LLM-Assisted Translation Between YANG and IoT Data Representations
• 5. Enabling AI Agents on the IoT Stack: CoAP and SDF Enhancements
• 6. When the Tower Crumbles: Losing the End-to-End Language with the Tower of AI

Conclusions and next steps

Next steps

• Interim Meetings: T2TRG plans to schedule interim virtual meetings after the summer break to accommodate presentations that could not fit into the IETF 126 agenda.
• Document Reviews: Members are encouraged to review the active RG drafts currently prepping for last calls (Guidance for RESTful design for IoT and Terminology and processes for initial security of IoT devices).

Our paper on "MARS: Multipath Adaptive Reliable Service has been accepted for publication at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

Abstract

Multipath transport is increasingly important for Internet/WAN services that move large data volumes across heterogeneous paths, including geo-distributed analytics, content distribution, and cloud-service pipelines. Existing solutions, however, face a practical trade-off: end-to-end transports such as MPTCP and MPQUIC are deployable but limited by endpointvisible paths and delayed congestion feedback, while routingor forwarder-assisted approaches often require infrastructure support or lack safe coordination across forwarding choices.

This paper presents MARS, a receiver-driven, forwarder-assisted multipath transport for Internet/WAN environments. MARS combines tier-synchronized overlay path discovery with coupled consumer/forwarder congestion control, enabling it to safely expand usable forwarding opportunities and react near bottlenecks. It runs as an incrementally deployable UDP overlay at clients, servers, relays, or CDN-like nodes.

We implement MARS in simulation and as a working prototype, and evaluate it through large-scale simulation and Mininet emulation under different deployment scales, loss rates, and failure scenarios. The results show that MARS provides deployment-dependent benefits: with endpoint-only deployment, it remains competitive with end-to-end multipath baselines; with cooperating overlay forwarders, it exposes richer usable path diversity and reduces max p95 flow completion time by up to 81.5% over ECMP-limited baselines. Even against path-expanded end-to-end baselines given the same path set, MARS achieves lower worst-case p95 FCT and stronger robustness under packet loss, while also recovering quickly from transient link failures.

These results demonstrate that ICN-style receiver-driven forwarding can serve as a deployable overlay transport substrate for WAN multipath, providing benefits beyond purely end-to-end designs without
requiring changes to IP routing.

Reference

Yitong Li, Xinjiao Li, Dirk Kutscher; MARS: Multipath Adaptive Reliable Service, accepted for publication at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP); Tempe, Arizona, USA, October 05-08, 2026

Our paper on "SAFS: Slack-Aware Flow Scheduling for Pipelined AI Workloads" has been accepted at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

Abstract

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly rely on pipelined execution across accelerators, stages, and disaggregated components. In these systems, a network transfer is harmful only when it arrives after the downstream computation has exhausted the slack that would otherwise hide the communication. Existing datacenter transports observe bytes, congestion, flow sizes, or externally assigned deadlines, but they do not know whether a particular activation, gradient, or hidden-state transfer is on the current pipeline critical path.

We present Slack-Aware Flow Scheduling (SAFS), a receiverdriven transport for pipelined AI workloads. SAFS exposes each communication flow as a semantic dependency with remaining bytes and a runtime-derived no-bubble timestamp. Receivers translate this metadata into no-bubble rate demand, allocate safe scheduled rate across contending senders, and amortize control overhead with reusable rate grants. We apply the same abstraction to pipeline-parallel (PP) training and attention–feed-forward network (FFN) disaggregation (AFD) inference.

In ZeroBubble training, SAFS is best or close to best across 0–5 background flows, reducing mean iteration time under contention by protecting the stage-boundary transfer whose lateness would become exposed stall. In 16A2F inference, where 16 attention instances feed two FFN instances, SAFS reduces p99 time per output token (TPOT) by 38.7% relative to D2TCP and 66.2% relative to Homa. Targeted microbenchmarks show zero urgent deadline misses and reduce mean urgent flow completion time to 14.3 ms.

Reference

Ruilong Wu, Yisu Wang, Jiaxiang Zou, Xiangsen Chen, Yixiang Zhu, Xinjiao Li, Xinyu Chen, Dirk Kutscher; SAFS: Slack-Aware Flow Scheduling for Pipelined AI Workloads; accepted for publication at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP); Tempe, Arizona, USA, October 05-08, 2026

Our paper on "MD2G-Cast: Relay-Coordinated Multicast for Scalable Volumetric Streaming over MoQ" has been accepted for publication at ACM Multimedia 2026..

Abstract

Volumetric streaming for immersive 6DoF experiences remains challenging to scale in multi-user settings. Existing systems treat overlapping field-of-view content as independent per-user flows, leading to redundant data replication across the network. This redundancy saturates shared links and manifests as unstable 𝑃99 tail latency, directly degrading interactive continuity.

We present MD2G-Cast, a relay-coordinated multicast framework over Media over QUIC (MoQ). Our key insight is that relays can act as decision points rather than passive forwarders when volumetric signals, such as viewing overlap, device heterogeneity, and bandwidth dynamics, are incorporated into relay decisions. MD2G-Cast enables relays to form reusable multicast groups and jointly schedule layered delivery, ensuring shared base-layer content is delivered once while enhancement layers are selectively assigned.

We implement MD2G-Cast on top of MoQ and evaluate it on a trace-driven testbed with real-world bandwidth and FoV traces. MD2G-Cast improves average QoE by 19% over multicast baselines while reducing 𝑃99 steady-state delivery delay by up to 30%. Under high concurrency, it achieves 53% higher QoE and up to 58.8% lower 𝑃99 steady-state delivery delay compared to a unicast baseline.

Reference

Ruonan Chai, Yisu Wang, Zili Meng, Dirk Kutscher; MD2G-Cast: Relay-Coordinated Multicast for Scalable Volumetric Streaming over MoQ, accepted for publication at ACM Multimedia 2026; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — 10–14 November 2026

Our paper on "MultiMoQ: Multi-Access Media-Over-QUIC for Robust Immersive Video Streaming" has been accepted for publication at ACM Multimedia 2026.

Abstract

Live immersive video streaming, particularly 360° video, is increasingly adopted in applications such as virtual events, sports broadcasting, and remote education. Existing approaches struggle to support high-bitrate immersive streaming for large numbers of concurrent users, with coarse-grained delivery limiting responsiveness and insufficient support for coordinating concurrent tile streams. Media over QUIC (MoQ) has recently emerged as a promising solution for large-scale media delivery, yet it lacks robustness under bandwidth-constrained conditions, often resulting in playback stalls.

To address these challenges, we present MultiMoQ, a multi-access tile streaming framework built on MoQ that redesigns its delivery mechanism to enable robust high-bitrate streaming across multiple access paths, while supporting flexible tile scheduling and seamless access switching without playback stalls.

We implement a fully functional prototype of MultiMoQ and evaluate it in network emulation under heterogeneous real-world network conditions, comparing against Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) and standard MoQ. Results show that MultiMoQ significantly improves robustness, increasing average goodput by about 61% and reducing tail end-to-end latency by about 69% compared to DASH, while reducing average stall time by about 97%ccompared to standard MoQ. These transport gains also translatecinto smoother viewport playback, reducing playback freeze ratio to 1.09%, compared with 3.96% for standard MoQ and 51.5% for DASH.

Reference

Yitong Li, Xinjiao Li, Ruonan Chai, Dirk Kutscher; MultiMoQ: Multi-Access Media-Over-QUIC for Robust Immersive Video Streaming; accepted for publication at ACM Multimedia 2026; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — 10–14 November 2026

Our paper on COMETS: Coordinated Multi-Destination Video Transmission with In-Network Rate Adaptation has been accepted for publication by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)

Abstract

Large-scale video streaming events attract millions of simultaneous viewers, stressing existing delivery infrastructures. Client-driven adaptation reacts slowly to shared congestion, while server-based coordination introduces scalability bottlenecks and single points of failure. We present COMETS, a coordinated multi-destination video transmission framework that leverages information-centric networking principles such as request aggregation and in-network state awareness to enable scalable, fair, and adaptive rate control. COMETS introduces a novel range-interest protocol and distributed in-network decision process that aligns video quality across receiver groups while minimizing redundant transmissions. To achieve this, we develop a lightweight distributed optimization framework that guides per-hop quality adaptation without centralized control. Extensive emulation shows that COMETS consistently improves bandwidth utilization, fairness, and user-perceived quality of experience over DASH, MoQ, and ICN baselines, particularly under high concurrency. The results highlight COMETS as a practical, deployable approach for next-generation scalable video delivery.

Introduction to COMETS

Nowadays, large streaming events typically attract millions of viewers, and the demand for concurrent video consumption is also expanding dramatically. For example, the number of monthly sports streaming viewers have grown from 57 million in 2021 to more than 90 million in 2025, with more than 17% users participating in multiple streams simultaneously. This explosive growth exposes fundamental limitations in existing video delivery architectures: how to maintain consistent, fair Quality of Experience (QoE) when thousands of users compete for shared bottleneck resources.

Existing infrastructures are not designed for effective coordination and resource sharing among large numbers of simultaneous viewers, resulting in inefficient management of concurrent requests for the same content segments and insufficient coordination of network resource allocation among users of the shared infrastructure. These inefficiencies lead to redundant data transmission and suboptimal bandwidth utilization, ultimately impairing user QoE by increasing network congestion, unstable bitrates, and higher incidences of buffering, especially during peak usage scenarios. To address these challenges, an ideal video delivery system must possess coordinated, scalable, and adaptive capabilities to maximize bandwidth utilization while ensuring a fair, high-quality experience for all users. Such a system should aggregate requests for the same content to eliminate redundancy, make intelligent in-network decisions and distribute computational load to avoid bottlenecks.

a) Latency vs. User Load	b) Mean Bitrate vs. User Load

Figure 1: Performance Comparison between baseline MoQ and server-optimized MoQ under increasing user load.

Current solutions exhibit fundamental limitations with respect to coordination and scalability. Client-adaptive approaches like Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) enable individual clients to select video representations independently. However, their uncoordinated decisions, based on delayed and localized network views, lag behind the actual state of shared network bottlenecks, leading to bandwidth contention and bitrate oscillations. Server-side approaches address these limitations by centralizing adaptation logic, enabling optimal resource allocation through comprehensive network and user demand assessments. However, managing state and control interactions for numerous users introduces scalability challenges, and centralized decision architectures create single points of failure that compromise real-time performance. Our experiments (Figure 1) demonstrate that even state-of-the-art server-optimized Media over QUIC (MoQ) ultimately encounters the same scalability barriers as baseline approaches under high concurrency.

Key Insights

We observe that effective multi-user video streaming requires two properties: I). aggregation-aware delivery, where identical requests are merged to eliminate redundant transmissions, and II). distributed coordination, where adaptation decisions are made at points of request convergence rather than at centralized endpoints. This leads us to consider Information-Centric Networking (ICN). ICN provides inherent advantages for multi-user content distribution through in-network caching and request aggregation in systems like CCNx/NDN. While these features reduce redundant transmissions by merging duplicate requests at forwarders, existing ICN-based solutions focus on hop-by-hop adaptation rather than coordinated multi-user rate adaptation, suffering from decision lag and failing to ensure efficient convergence toward stable, fair rate allocations (i.e., equitable QoE distribution). To address these limitations, we present COMETS (Coordinated Multi-Destination Video Transmission with In-Network Rate Adaptation), a scalable, ICN-based multi-destination video streaming framework engineered to resolve challenges in large-scale video delivery: redundant data transmission, lack of scalable coordination, and inefficient system convergence.

Design Philosophy

COMETS is based on three principles that distinguish it from prior work: I). Group-aware rather than individual optimization. Instead of each client independently selecting bitrates, COMETS groups receivers with similar capabilities and network conditions, then aligns video quality across each group. This transforms the combinatorial complexity of individual decisions into tractable group-level optimization. II). Proactive rather than reactive adaptation. Unlike existing ICN approaches that react to congestion signals, COMETS uses a distributed Lagrangian framework where forwarders exchange dual variables (price signals) to anticipate upstream constraints. This enables proactive coordination without centralized state collection. III). Deployable overlay architecture. COMETS requires no modifications to network infrastructure. To ensure deployability, COMETS is architecturally flexible and can be deployed as an application-layer overlay network over existing Internet protocols (e.g., HTTP/QUIC over UDP), similar to Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Akamai or CloudFlare. It requires no infrastructure modifications and assumes trusted intermediate nodes under the same administrative domain, enabling immediate integration into today’s networks without network-layer changes. While COMETS shares MoQ’s vision of moving intelligence into the network, it avoids central bottlenecks by enabling per-hop optimization via ICN primitives, and is deployable over MoQ-capable infrastructures as an overlay.

Our Approach. COMETS transforms video streaming from isolated endpoint control into coordinated in-network negotiation, with four key contributions:

• Range-interest protocol for coordinated adaptation. We introduce a novel protocol where clients express resolution ranges rather than specific quality levels. This enables forwarders to aggregate requests and optimize resolution assignments across user groups, shifting adaptation logic from endpoints to the network fabric.
• Scalable architecture without central bottlenecks. COMETS distributes adaptation logic across forwarders, combining request aggregation with per-hop decision-making.
• Distributed optimization with closed-form solutions. We formalize coordinated multi-destination video transmission as a unified Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem and develop a two-stage distributed algorithm. Unlike prior ICN approaches that rely on heuristics or reactive congestion signals, our method derives analytical closed-form solutions for per-hop quality decisions, enabling proactive, group-aware rate allocation with provable convergence guarantees.
• Implementation and Evaluation: Through extensive emulation on Mini-NDN with up to 300 concurrent clients, we demonstrate that COMETS achieves consistent QoE scores above 0.7 across all tested scales, while baselines degrade below 0.5 at high concurrency. COMETS maintains near-perfect fairness (Jain’s index ≥ 0.93) and achieves optimization convergence within 50ms—up to 3.7× faster than centralized approaches.

References

Yulong Zhang, Ying Cui, Zili Meng, Abhishek Kumar, Dirk Kutscher; COMETS: Coordinated Multi-Destination Video Transmission with In-Network Rate Adaptation; IEEE Transactions on Multimedia; 2026; pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18670

Organizers

• Antoine Fressancourt
• Dirk Kutscher

The 1st workshop on Inter-networking challenges for AI (INet4AI), collocated with ACM CoNEXt'25, was held on the 1st of December 2025 in Hong-Kong. The workshop was inspired by ongoing discussion in the IRTF on research challenges for (inter-)networking technologies for AI workloads.

This full day workshop explored some of the networking challenges of large-scale distributed AI workloads in environments, characterized by node and network heterogeneity, as well as dynamically changing resource availability and utilization. During this inaugural edition, researchers from both academia (HKUST, ETH Zurich, Politecnico di Milano, University of Napoli, Tsinghua University, TU Munich) and industry (Huawei, AMD, Microsoft, and others) discussed possible solutions to address the challenges raised by Internet-scale distributed AI systems with four workshop paper presentations and three invited talks. In this report, we will first give a summary of the workshop papers and invited talks. Then we will draw some general remarks regarding the ongoing efforts done in our community to address INet4AI challenges.

Check out the full report.

Program Overview

• Invited talk — Tommaso Bonato — Uno: A One-Stop Solution for Inter- and Intra-Datacenter Congestion Control and Reliable Connectivity — Paper · Slides.
• AI4Net paper — Shaked Leibzirer — Self-supervised Application-level Network Traffic Inversion — Paper · Slides.
• Net4AI paper — German Sviridov — Latency-Optimal Load Balancing For Distributed MoE Inference — Paper.
• Invited talk — Mingxing Zhang — From Homogeneous to Disaggregated Architectures for Large Model Inference — Slides.
• Net4AI paper — Jiaheng Xiong — SCALE-CCL: A Scalable Collective Communication Library for Wide-Area Distributed Training — Paper · Slides.
• Net4AI paper — Giuseppe Aceto — You’ve got a few GPUs, now what?! — Experimenting with a Nano-Cluster for Distributed Training of AI Models — Paper · Slides.
• Invited talk — Wenjia Wei — Debriefing the Open Innovation Platform for UnifiedBus — Slides.

Submit nominations for the 2026 award period of the Applied Networking Research Prize until November 17, 2025: https://www.irtf.org/anrp/

The Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) is awarded to recognise the best recent results in applied networking, interesting new research ideas of potential relevance to the Internet standards community, and upcoming people that are likely to have an impact on Internet standards and technologies, with a particular focus on cases where these people or ideas would not otherwise get much exposure or be able to participate in the discussion.

We encourage nominations of researchers with relevant research results, interesting ideas, and new perspectives. The award will offer them the opportunity to present and discuss their work with the engineers, network operators, policy makers, and scientists that participate in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its research arm, the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). Both self- and third-party nominations for this prize are encouraged.

I gave a talk at the Future Network Development Conference (FNDC) in Nanjing on August 20th, 2025. The title of the talk was Connecting AI: Inter-Networking Challenges for Distributed Machine Learning, and I talked about our recent work on PacTrain, NetSenseML, and some new work on in-network aggregation.

PacTrain is a novel framework that accelerates distributed training by combining pruning with sparse gradient compression. Active pruning of the neural network makes the model weights and gradients sparse. By ensuring the global knowledge of the gradient sparsity among all distributed training workers, we can perform lightweight compression communication without harming accuracy. We show that the PacTrain compression scheme achieves a near-optimal compression strategy while remaining compatible with the all- reduce primitive. Experimental evaluations show that PacTrain improves training throughput by 1.25 to 8.72× compared to state-of-the-art compression-enabled systems for representative vision and language models training tasks under bandwidth-constrained conditions.

NetSenseML is a novel network adaptive distributed deep learning framework that dynamically adjusts quantization, pruning, and compression strategies in response to real-time network conditions. By actively monitoring network conditions, NetSenseML applies gradient compression only when network congestion negatively impacts convergence speed, thus effectively balancing data payload reduction and model accuracy preservation. Our approach ensures efficient resource usage by adapting reduction techniques based on current network conditions, leading to shorter convergence times and improved training efficiency. Experimental evaluations show that NetSenseML can improve training throughput by a factor of 1.55x to 9.84x compared to state-of-the-art compression-enabled systems for representative DDL training jobs in bandwidth-constrained conditions.

Our paper on INDS: Incremental Named Data Streaming for Real-Time Point Cloud Video has been accepted at ACM Multimedia 2025.

Abstract:

Real-time streaming of point cloud video – characterized by high data volumes and extreme sensitivity to packet loss – presents significant challenges under dynamic network conditions. Traditional connection-oriented protocols such as TCP/IP incur substantial retransmission overhead and head-of-line blocking under lossy conditions, while reactive adaptation approaches such as DASH lead to frequent quality fluctuations and a suboptimal user experience. In this paper, we introduce INDS (Incremental Named Data Streaming), a novel adaptive transmission framework that exploits the inherent layered encoding and hierarchical object structure of point cloud data to enable clients to selectively request enhancement layers based on available bandwidth and decoding capabilities. Built on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) principles, INDS employs a hierarchical naming scheme organized by time windows and Groups of Frames (GoF), which enhances cache reuse and facilitates efficient data sharing, ultimately reducing both network and server load. We implemented a fully functional prototype and evaluated it using emulated network scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate that INDS reduces end-to-end delay by up to 80%, boosts effective throughput by 15%–50% across diverse operating conditions, and increases cache hit rates by 20%–30% on average.

References

Ruonan Chai, Yixiang Zhu, Xinjiao Li, Jiawei Li, Zili Meng, Dirk Kutscher; INDS: Incremental Named Data Streaming for Real-Time Point Cloud Video; accepted for publication at ACM Multimedia 2025; October 2025