Archive for the ‘ietf’ tag
Interview on the IETF Blog
The IETF has recently published an interview with me on the IETF Blog.
HKUST Internet Research Workshop (HKIRW) 2025
We are organizing the 2025 HKUST Internet Research Workshop (HKIRW) in the week before the IETF-122 meeting in Bangkok. This workshop aims to bring together researchers in computer networking and systems around the globe to a live forum discussing innovative ideas at their early stages. The mission of the workshop is that promising but not-yet-mature ideas can receive timely feedback from the community and experienced researchers, leading them into future IRTF work, Internet Drafts, or IETF working groups.
The workshop will operate like a “one day Dagstuhl seminar” and will focus on discussion and ideas exchange and less on conference-style presentations. The objective is to identify topics and connect like-minded people for potential future collaboration.
Please see https://hkirw.github.io/2025/ for details.
References
IRTF DINRG Meeting at IETF-121
The IRTF DINRG Meeting at IETF-121 takes place on 2024-11-06 at 13:00 to 14:30 UTC.
1 | DINRG Chairs’ Presentation: Status, Updates | Chairs | 05 min |
2 | Distributing DDoS Analytics among ASes | Daniel Wagner | 20 min |
3 | The Role of DNS names in Internet Decentralization | Tianyuan Yu | 20 min |
4 | Taxonomy of Internet Consolidation & Effects of Internet Consolidation | Marc McFadden | 15 min |
5 | DINRG – Next Steps | Chairs & Panelists | 30 min |
6 | Wrap-up & Buffer | Chairs | 00 min |
Documents and Links to Resources
- United We Stand: Collaborative Detection and Mitigation of
Amplification DDoS Attacks at
Scale - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcfadden-cnsldtn-effects/
Notes
Please remember that all sessions are being recorded.
RFC 9556: Internet of Things (IoT) Edge Challenges and Functions
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Many Internet of Things (IoT) applications have requirements that cannot be satisfied by centralized cloud-based systems (i.e., cloud computing). These include time sensitivity, data volume, connectivity cost, operation in the face of intermittent services, privacy, and security. As a result, IoT is driving the Internet toward edge computing.
We have published RFC 9556, outlining the requirements of the emerging IoT edge and its challenges. It presents a general model and major components of the IoT edge to provide a common basis for future discussions in the Thing-to-Thing Research Group (T2TRG) and other IRTF and IETF groups.
Today, many IoT services leverage cloud computing platforms because they provide virtually unlimited storage and processing power. The reliance of IoT on back-end cloud computing provides additional advantages, such as scalability and efficiency. At the time of writing, IoT systems are fairly static with respect to integrating and supporting computation. It is not that there is no computation, but that systems are often limited to static configurations (edge gateways and cloud services).
However, IoT devices generate large amounts of data at the edges of the network. To meet IoT use case requirements, data is increasingly being stored, processed, analyzed, and acted upon close to the data sources. These requirements include time sensitivity, data volume, connectivity cost, and resiliency in the presence of intermittent connectivity, privacy, and security, which cannot be addressed by centralized cloud computing. A more flexible approach is necessary to address these needs effectively. This involves distributing computing (and storage) and seamlessly integrating it into the edge-cloud continuum. We refer to this integration of edge computing and IoT as "IoT edge computing". RFC 9556 describes the related background, use cases, challenges, system models, and functional components.
Towards a Unified Transport Protocol for In-Network Computing in Support of RPC-based Applications
The emerging term In-Network Computin (INC) [inc] in particular refers applying on-path programmable networking devices (e.g., switches and routers between clients and servers) as an accelerator or function offloader to boost throughput, reduce server load, or improve latency, typically in a well-controlled data center network environment.
Some INC implementations evolved from programmable data plane systems and align with the trend of network programmability at large. In recent year, it has been shown to support many promising applications (e.g., caching, aggregation, and agreement). For example, in distributed machine learning (DML), training nodes produce data (gradients) that needs to be aggregated or reduced -- and the result could be distributed to one or multiple consumers. As another example, the NetClone system [netclone] uses in-network forwarder to replicate RPC invocation messages and to perform more informed forwarding based on observed latencies for accelerating RPC communication.
While it is possible to achieve this kind of operation purely with end-to-end communication between worker nodes, performance can be dramatically improved by offloading both the operation processing and the data dissemination to nodes in the network. These in-network processors are often conceived as semi-transparent performance enhancing on-path elements, i.e., they are not the actual endpoints in transport protocol sessions and would intercept packets with application data and potentially generate new data that they would have to transmit.
In our Internet Draft draft-song-inc-transport-protocol-req-01.txt, we are discussing this problem and are formulating some requirements for the design of future transport protocols in this space.
References
- Collective Communication: Better Network Abstractions for AI
- Computing in the Network – Lessons Learned and New Opportunities
- [I-D.yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases] Yao, K., Shiping, X., Li, Y., Huang, H., and D. KUTSCHER, "Collective Communication Optimization: Problem Statement and Use cases", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases-00, 23 October 2023, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases-00.
- [inc] Klenk et al., B., "An In-Network Architecture for Accelerating Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Collectives", ACM/IEEE 47th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 2020, <https:dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISCA45697.2020.00085>
- [netclone] Kim, G., "NetClone: Fast, Scalable, and Dynamic Request Cloning for Microsecond-Scale RPCs", In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference (ACM SIGCOMM '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 195-207, 2023 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604820
IETF Datatracker Document Metadata Processing
I have created two tools for fetching and formatting metadata for IETF documents (RFCs and Internet Drafts). I sometimes want to create publications lists or just reference IETF documents in other publications, and these tools are intended to automate the process as much as possible.
- tracker-doc: for fetching document metadata by user-id (datatracker ID)
- bibdoc: for formatting document metadata in text or bibtex format
These are two Clojure scripts that are executed by Babashka – a native Clojure interpreter for scripting.
Install: datatracker-publications on GitHub.
DINRG @ IETF-118
We have posted the agenda for our DINRG meeting at IETF-118:
Documents
- The Cloud Strikes Back: Investigating the Decentralization of IPFS
- Local-First Software
- draft-mcfadden-consolidation-taxonomy-03
Logistics
DINRG Meeting at IETF-118 – 2023-11-06, 08:30 to 10:30 UTC
ICNRG @ IETF-118
We have posted the agenda our ICNRG meeting at IETF-118:
Drafts
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irtf-icnrg-flic/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases/00/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-requirement-and-analysis/00/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-li-icnrg-damc/
Logistics
ICNRG Meeting at IETF-118 – 2023-11-07, 08:30 to 10:30 UTC
Collective Communication: Better Network Abstractions for AI
We have submitted two new Internet Drafts on Collective Communication:
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Kehan Yao , Xu Shiping , Yizhou Li , Hongyi Huang , Dirk Kutscher; Collective Communication Optimization: Problem Statement and Use cases; Internet Draft draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-problem-statement-and-usecases-00; work in progress; October 2023
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Kehan Yao , Xu Shiping , Yizhou Li , Hongyi Huang , Dirk Kutscher; Collective Communication Optimization: Requirement and Analysis; Internet Draft draft-yao-tsvwg-cco-requirement-and-analysis-00; work in progress; October 2023
Collective Communication refers to communication between a group of processes in distributed computing contexts, for example involving interaction types such as broadcast, reduce, all-reduce. This data-oriented communication model is employed by distributed machine learning and other data processing systems, such as stream processing. Current Internet network and transport protocols (and corresponding transport layer security) make it difficult to support these interactions in the network, e.g., for aggregating data on topologically optimal nodes for performance enhancements. These two drafts discuss use cases, problems, and initial ideas for requirements for future system and protocol design for Collective Communication. They will be discussed at IETF-118.
IRTF Decentralization of the Internet Research Group at IETF-117
Recent years have witnessed the consolidations of the Internet applications, services, as well as the infrastructure. The Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DINRG) aims to provide for the research and engineering community, both an open forum to discuss the Internet centralization phenomena and associated potential threats, and a platform to facilitate the coordination of efforts in identifying the causes of observed consolidations and the mitigation solutions.
Our upcoming DINRG meeting at IETF-117 will feature three talks – by Cory Doctorow, Volker Stocker & William Lehr, and Christian Tschudin.
1 | DINRG Chairs’ Presentation: Status, Updates | Chairs | 05 min |
2 | Let The Platforms Burn: Bringing Back the Good Fire of the Old Internet | Cory Doctorow | 30 min |
3 | Ecosystem Evolution and Digital Infrastructure Policy Challenges: Insights & Reflections from an Economics Perspective | Volker Stocker & William Lehr | 20 min |
4 | Minimal Global Broadcast (MGB) | Christian Tschudin | 20 min |
5 | Wrap-up & Buffer | All | 15 min |
Documents
Logistics
DINRG Meeting at IETF-117 – 2023-07-25, 20:00 to 21:30 UTC