Session Date/Time: 27 Jul 2023 20:00

irtfopen

Summary

The IRTF Open Meeting at IETF 117 in San Francisco covered administrative matters, IRTF updates, research group news, recent RFC publications, the Applied Networking Research Prize, and the Applied Networking Research Workshop. Simon Scherer presented his ANRP award-winning work on modeling BBR congestion control. Unfortunately, Shiva Kakakla was unable to present and will reschedule.

Key Discussion Points

IRTF Overview: The IRTF focuses on longer-term research issues and is not a standards development organization.
Research Group Updates:
- ICCRG chairs, Jana Iyengar and Michael Shapira, are stepping down. Symone Ferlin will continue and additional chairs are being sought.
- The Coding for Network Communications Research Group (NWCRG) will be closing after this meeting, having completed its work.
- The Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Research Group has been rechartered and renamed to the Decentralization of the Internet Research Group. Focus shifted from centralized technologies to the economic aspects of centralization and decentralization.
RFC Publications: Recent RFCs published by the IRTF include those from NWCRG on network coding protocols and from PEARG on transient numeric identifiers.
Applied Networking Research Prize: Simon Scherer received the award for his work on modeling the BBR congestion control algorithm. Shiva Kakakla was scheduled to receive an award for work verifying name servers but was unable to attend.
Applied Networking Research Workshop: The workshop took place on Monday and was considered a success. The 2024 workshop will co-locate with the Vancouver IETF.
Travel Grants: Travel grants were awarded to 12 early career academics and PhD students.
Simon Scherer's Presentation:
- Developed a fluid model for BBR congestion control.
- Validated the model experimentally.
- Proved that BBR converges.
- Fluid models can predict congestion control behavior with surprising accuracy
- Identified BBRv2 buffering behavior and its root cause
- Fluid models can potentially support standardization efforts
- BBRv2 remains an incomplete improvement over BBRv1

Decisions and Action Items

Action Item: Reschedule Shiva Kakakla's ANRP talk for the November meeting.
Action Item: Contact Colin Perkins if interested in serving as chair of the Contrition Control Research Group.
Action Item: Look out for details on travel grants for the Prague IETF/IRTF meetings.
Action Item: Look out for details in the call for paper for the 2024 Applied Networking Research workshop.

Next Steps

Simon to consider including application limits to his BBR fluid model
Simon to work on results where BBR instability is observed competing with loss based algorithms
Simon to accommodate BBR version 3 changes in the BBR fluid model