homegate Working Group charter approved

All - I had a brief moment of brain-lockup (helped along by e-mail autocompletion).  This message was intended to announce the approval of the homenet WG.  Please ignore anything I might have said about homegate...

- Ralph

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The IESG approved the formation of the homegate Working Group during today's telechat.  The WG's first meeting will be in Quebec, as shown in the IETF-81 meeting agenda.  The initial charter for the WG is included below.  Mark Townsley has agreed to be one of the WG co-chairs (thanks, Mark!).  We will be choosing a second co-chair soon, so please let Jari and me know if you're interested in taking on that role.

Mark will start a thread here soon to develop the agenda for the upcoming WG meeting.

Thanks to all of you who have been following the development of the WG and especially for the enthusiastic discussion about the charter.  We're counting on all of you to continue your contributions to the success of the WG.

- Ralph Droms
 Internet Area Director

Home Networks (homenet)-----------------------------------

Current Status: Proposed
Last Edit: Wednesday, July 14th, 2011

Chairs:
"W. Mark Townsley" 

Internet Area Directors:
Ralph Droms 
Jari Arkko 

Internet Area Advisor:
Ralph Droms 

Routing Area Technical Advisor:
TBD

Security Area Technical Advisor:
TBD

Mailing Lists:
General Discussion: 
To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/fun
Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/fun

Description of Working Group:

This working group focuses on the evolving networking technology
within and among relatively small "residential home" networks. For
example, an obvious trend in home networking is the proliferation of
networking technology in an increasingly broad range and number of
devices. This evolution in scale and diversity sets some requirements
on IETF protocols. Some of the relevant trends include:

o  Multiple segments: While less complex L3-toplogies involving as few
 subnets as possible are preferred in home networks for a variety of
 reasons including simpler management and service discovery, the
 introduction of more than one subnet into a home network is enough
 to add complexity that needs to be addressed, and multiple
 dedicated segments are necessary for some cases.  For instance, a
 common feature in modern home routers in the ability to support
 both guest and private network segments. Also, link layer
 networking technology is poised to become more heterogeneous, as
 networks begin to employ both traditional Ethernet technology and
 link layers designed for low-powered sensor networks. Finally,
 similar needs for segmentation may occur in other cases, such as
 separating building control or corporate extensions from the
 Internet access network for the home. Different segments may be
 associated with subnets that have different routing and security
 policies.

o  Service providers are deploying IPv6, and support for IPv6 is
 increasingly available in home gateway devices. While IPv6 resembles
 IPv4 in many ways, it changes address allocation principles and allows
 direct IP addressability and routing to devices in the home from the
 Internet. This is a promising area in IPv6 that has proved challenging
 in IPv4 with the proliferation of NAT.

o  End-to-end communication is both an opportunity and a concern as it
 enables new applications but also exposes nodes in the internal
 networks to receipt of unwanted traffic from the Internet. Firewalls
 that restrict incoming connections may be used to prevent exposure,
 however, this reduces the efficacy of end-to-end connectivity that
 IPv6 has the potential to restore.

Home networks need to provide the tools to handle these situations in
a manner accessible to all users of home networks. Manual
configuration is rarely, if at all, possible, as the necessary skills
and in some cases even suitable management interfaces are missing.

The purpose of this working group is to focus on this evolution, in
particular as it addresses the introduction of IPv6, by developing an
architecture addressing this full scope of requirements:

o  prefix configuration for routers
o  managing routing
o  name resolution
o  service discovery
o  network security

The task of the group is to produce an architecture document that
outlines how to construct home networks involving multiple routers and
subnets. This document is expected to apply the IPv6 addressing
architecture, prefix delegation, global and ULA addresses, source
address selection rules and other existing components of the IPv6
architecture, as appropriate. The architecture document should drive
what protocols changes, if any, are necessary. Specific protocol work
described below is expected to be within the scope of the working
group once the architecture work is complete. However, the group is
required to review its charter and milestones with the IESG and IETF
community before submitting documents that make protocol changes. It
is expected that the group has to discuss some of the below solutions,
however, in order to complete the architecture work.

The group will apply existing protocols to handle the five
requirements above. For prefix configuration, existing protocols are
likely sufficient, and at worst may need some small enhancements, such
as new options. For automatic routing, it is expected that existing
routing protocols can be used as is, however, a new mechanism may be
needed in order to turn a selected protocol on by default. For name
resolution and service discovery, extensions to existing
multicast-based name resolution protocols are needed to enable them to
work across subnets.

For network security, the group shall document the concept of
"advanced security" as a further development of "simple security" from
RFC 6092. The main goal of this work is to enable a security policy
that adapts to IPv6 threats as they emerge, taking into account not
only traffic from the Internet at large, but within and leaving the
home network itself.

It is expected that the working group will define a set of protocol
specifications to accomplish the five requirements from
above. However, it is not in the scope of the working group to define
entirely new routing protocols or address allocation protocols. As
noted, additional options or other small extensions may be necessary
to use the existing protocols in these new configuration tasks. The
working group shall also not make any changes to IPv6 protocols or
addressing architecture. Prefix configuration, routing, and security
related work shall not cause any changes that are not backwards
compatible to existing IPv6 hosts. There may be host visible changes
in the work on naming and discovery protocols, however. In its design,
the working group shall also consider security aspects and the impact
on manageability. The main focus of the working group is home
networks, but the group's results may also find applications in other
small networks. The group should assume that an IPv4 network may have
to co-exist alongside the IPv6 network and should take this into
account insofar as alignment with IPv6 is desirable. But the group
should also ensure that even IPv6-only are possible, and while
IP-version agnostic work is of course desirable, IPv4-specific work is
outside the scope of the group.

The working group will liaise with the relevant IETF working
groups. In particular, the group should work closely with the V6OPS
working group, review any use or extension of DHCP with the DHC
working group, and work with additional DNS requirements with the
DNSEXT and DNSOP working groups. If it turns out that additional
options are needed for a routing protocol, they will be developed in
the appropriate Routing Area working group, with the HOMENET working
group providing the architecture and requirements for such
enhancements. The working group will also liason with external
standards bodies where it is expected that there are normative
dependencies between the specifications of the two bodies.
It is expected that in the architecture definition stage liaising
with the Broadband Forum, DLNA, and UPnP Forum is necessary, 
as is understanding existing technology from these groups.

Milestones:

Jul 2011 Formation of the working group
Sep 2011 First WG draft on the architecture
Dec 2011 Submission of the architecture draft to the IESG as Informational RFC
Dec 2011 Charter re-evaluation based on the architecture work
Dec 2011 First WG draft on prefix configuration
Dec 2011 First WG draft on routing
Jan 2012 First WG draft on name resolution
Feb 2012 First WG draft on service discovery
Feb 2012 First WG draft on perimeter security
Feb 2012 Start of routing related work in the relevant routing area working group, if needed
Mar 2012 Submission of the prefix configuration draft to the IESG as Standards Track RFC
Apr 2012 Submission of the routing draft to the IESG as Informational RFC
Sep 2012 Submission of the name resolution draft to the IESG as Standards Track RFC
Nov 2012 Submission of the service discovery draft to the IESG as Standards Track RFC
Dec 2012 Submission of the perimeter security draft to the IESG as Informational RFC