GenDispatch Working Group R. Bonica Internet-Draft Juniper Networks Intended status: Best Current Practice A. Farrel Expires: 9 February 2025 Old Dog Consulting 8 August 2024 IETF Experiments draft-bonica-gendispatch-exp-01 Abstract This document describes IETF protocol experiments and provides guidelines for the publication of Experimental RFCs. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on 9 February 2025. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2024 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/ license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License. Bonica & Farrel Expires 9 February 2025 [Page 1] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments August 2024 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Requirements on Experimental RFCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1. Codepoints in Experimental RFCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2. Requirements Level Language and Keywords . . . . . . . . 5 3. Experimental Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1. Introduction According to [RFC2026], the "Experimental" designation for an RFC typically denotes a specification that is part of a research or development effort. An Experimental RFC may be published for information and as an archival record of the work. An Experimental RFC may be the output of an IRTF Research Group, an IETF Working Group, or it may be an individual contribution that is sponsored by an Area Director or published on the Independent Submission Stream. Experimental RFCs in the IETF Stream describe IETF experiments. IETF process experiments are described in [RFC3933], but this document is concerned with protocol experiments. An IETF protocol experiment is a procedure that is executed on the Internet for a bounded period of time. The experiment can, but does not always, include the deployment of a new protocol or protocol extension. For example, when two protocols are proposed to solve a single problem, the IETF can initiate an experiment in which each protocol is deployed. Operational experience obtained during the experiments can help to determine which, if either, of the protocols should be progressed to the standards track. An IETF protocol experiment must not harm the Internet or interfere with established network operations. It must be conducted in a carefully controlled manner (for example, using a limited domain [RFC8799]). Furthermore, it must use protocol identifiers and code points that do not conflict with deployments of standardized protocols or other experiments. When an IETF protocol experiment concludes, experimental results should be reported to the relevant working group usually via an Internet-Draft, and may be published in an Informational RFCs. Bonica & Farrel Expires 9 February 2025 [Page 2] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments August 2024 This document describes IETF protocol experiments and provides guidelines for the publication of Experimental RFCs. Experimental RFCs in the Independent Submissions Stream or published by the IRTF are out of scope of this document. 2. Requirements on Experimental RFCs An Experimental RFC must describe the experimental nature of the specification or deployment that it documents. An Experimental RFC should: * Describe the experiment in detail, so that it can be replicated by non-collaborating parties and recognized when it is seen in deployments. * Describe how the experiment is safegarded so that it does not harm the Internet or interfere with its established operations. - It should indicate how messages or protocol data units are identified and associated with the experiment. - It should describe how backward compatability is ensured by non-participating deployments using pre-existing standardized mechanisms to discard or ignore the experiment. - It should explain how the experiment is controlled so that it does not "leak out" into the wider Internet. * List what configuration knobs should be provided on experimental implementations * Include a date at which the experiment will be terminated. * Include metrics and observations that will be collected during the experiment. * Include criteria by which success of the experiment will be determined. * Explain how reports of the success or failure of the experiment will be brought to the IETF. * Suggest planned next steps if the experiment is fully or partially successful. Bonica & Farrel Expires 9 February 2025 [Page 3] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments August 2024 When two protocol mechanisms are proposed to solve a single problem, the IETF can initiate an experiment in which each protocol is deployed. In this case, the same metrics should be collected in each experiment. 2.1. Codepoints in Experimental RFCs [RFC8126] describes guidelines for writing IANA Considerations sections in RFCs. It lists a number of assignment policies that apply to codepoint registries maintained by IANA. Experimental RFCs cannot obtain codepoints from registries or parts of registries that are managed under the following assignment policies: * Standards Action * Hierarchical Allocation An Experimental RFC may request and be granted codepoints from registries or parts of registries that are managed under the following assignment policies: * First Come First Served * Expert Review * Specification Required * RFC Required * IETF Review * IESG Approval Consideration must be given to the fact that the experiment may be temporary in nature and the protocol or protocol extensions may be abandoned. If there is a scarcity of available codepoints in a registry, even more caution should be applied to any codepoint assignments. Bonica & Farrel Expires 9 February 2025 [Page 4] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments August 2024 Some registries or parts of registries are marked as "For Experimental Use: Not to be assigned." These ranges are specifically intended for use by protocol experiments, and this may be particularly valuable as described in [RFC3692]. But assigments are not made from these codepoint ranges and Experimental RFCs must not document any codepoints from such ranges. Instead, protocol implementations should allow the codepoints to be configured so that all implementations participating in an experiment can interoperate and so that multiple experiments may co-exist in the same network. Experiments may additionally use codepoints from Private Use ranges, but these codepoints are also not recorded Additionally, IANA will not create any new registries or sub- registries as specified in Experimental RFCs. Experimental RFCs that would otherwise ask for the creation of protocol registries can simply enumerate the codepoints within the RFC. [Editors' note: The first sentence in the previous paragraph is to be verified by IANA.] 2.2. Requirements Level Language and Keywords An Experimental RFC describing a protocol experiment may use BCP 14 requirements level language and keywords [RFC2119] [RFC8174] to help clarify the description of the protocol or prtocol extension and the expected behavior of implementations. 3. Experimental Reports Experimental Reports should include the following information: * Scale of deployment * Effort required to deploy - Was deployment incremental or network-wide? - Was there a need to synchronize configurations at each node or could nodes be configured independently - Did the deployment require hardware upgrade? * Effort required to secure * Performance impact of risk mitigation * Effectiveness of risk mitigation Bonica & Farrel Expires 9 February 2025 [Page 5] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments August 2024 * Cost of risk mitigation * Interoperability * Did you deploy two inter-operable implementations? * Did you experience interoperability problems? * Effectiveness and sufficiency of OAM mechanism 4. IANA Considerations This document does not make any requests of IANA, but see Section 2.1 for details of the use of codepoints in Experimental RFCs. 5. Security Considerations As this document does not introduce any new protocols or operational procedures, it does not introduce any new security considerations. Experimental RFCs must include security and privacy considerations as with any other RFC. As well as considering the security and privacy implications of the protocol or protocol extensions, Experimental RFCs should examine the implications for security and privacy of running an experiment on the Internet. 6. Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge Dhruv Dhody for helpful discussions of experimenal code points. 7. References 7.1. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, . [RFC8126] Cotton, M., Leiba, B., and T. Narten, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 8126, DOI 10.17487/RFC8126, June 2017, . [RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017, . Bonica & Farrel Expires 9 February 2025 [Page 6] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments August 2024 7.2. Informative References [RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, DOI 10.17487/RFC2026, October 1996, . [RFC3692] Narten, T., "Assigning Experimental and Testing Numbers Considered Useful", BCP 82, RFC 3692, DOI 10.17487/RFC3692, January 2004, . [RFC3933] Klensin, J. and S. Dawkins, "A Model for IETF Process Experiments", BCP 93, RFC 3933, DOI 10.17487/RFC3933, November 2004, . [RFC8799] Carpenter, B. and B. Liu, "Limited Domains and Internet Protocols", RFC 8799, DOI 10.17487/RFC8799, July 2020, . Authors' Addresses Ron Bonica Juniper Networks Herndon, Virginia United States of America Email: rbonica@juniper.net Adrian Farrel Old Dog Consulting United Kingdom Email: adrian@olddog.co.uk Bonica & Farrel Expires 9 February 2025 [Page 7]