Computer Science at Karlstad University participated in IETF95

IETF is an independent international organisation concerned with the development and maintenance of the Internet. The organisation creates and maintains Internet standardisation processes. Three weeklong meetings are arranged annually by the IETF and facilitate the meeting of researchers and developers in different fora and working groups. One of these is the so-called BoF, the Birds of a Feather forum.
A BoF is an informal discussion session used by the IETF to initiate new subgroups for members who share a specific interest. Toke Høiland-Jørgensen, PhD student in Computer Science at Karlstad University, presented his implementation of the Babel protocol to a BoF. Babel is a routing protocol, aimed at enabling the home routers of the future to self-configure and communicate with each other. The protocol was designed by Juliusz Chroboczek, researcher at Université de Paris-Diderot.
“I have implemented the protocol designed by Juliusz in a new way. I presented my experience of this work and the results of the implementation during the BoF session,” says Toke Høiland-Jørgensen.

Toke Høiland-Jørgensen tillsammans med Juliusz Chroboczek under IETF95.
If the protocol and its description of the protocol are done thoroughly enough, and if there is interest in, a working group is formed for a period to refine the protocol and its documentation and thereby bring about a standardisation.
Participation in two further working groups
IETF meetings also include more formal meetings of the working groups established to develop new standards or to revise existing ones. During IETF95, Computer Science also participated in two established working groups: TAPS, Transport Services, and RMCAT, RTP Media Congestion Avoidance Techniques.
The TAPS working group works towards specifying and standardising new transport services for the development of Internet communication. This work partly overlaps with the work in the EU project NEAT (A New, Evolutive API and Transport-Layer Architecture for the Internet), in which Computer Science at Karlstad University is one of the partners.
NEAT works on creating a new kind of architecture that facilitates the communication of diverse applications over the Internet. The aim is to make Internet communication more flexible and to make it easier for application developers to choose how their applications communicate over different types of networks. An interface is needed between applications and networks to make this possible, and the NEAT project is currently developing such an interface. A number of different transport services are specified in the interface.
“During the TAPS meeting at IETF95, a prototype of the NEAT interface was presented,” says Anna Brunström, professor of Computer Science at Karlstad University. “We presented our prototype to showcase the work that has been done as part of the project, but also to receive comments from the participants in TAPS and to give them the opportunity to contribute to the development of the new architecture, the interface and especially the transport services that will be included. Many of the participants in TAPS are also working on the interface as part of the NEAT project.”

Professor Anna Brunström
Anna Brunström is also one of two chairs of the RMCAT working group, which investigates the standardisation of congestion control mechanisms for real-time media.
“I participated remotely in the RMCAT meeting. There’s always the possibility of doing that for all IETF meetings. I also helped plan the RMCAT meeting,” says Anna Brunström. “The meeting examined congestion control algorithms that the group is developing and that are being evaluated for possible future standardisation.”
Read more about NEAT
Read more about IETF and IETF95
Read more about Babel