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Characterising the IETF through the lens of RFC deployment

Published: 02 November 2021 Publication History
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    Protocol standards, defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), are crucial to the successful operation of the Internet. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of IETF activities, with a focus on understanding collaborative activities, and how these underpin the publication of standards documents (RFCs). Using a unique dataset of 2.4 million emails, 8,711 RFCs and 4,512 authors, we examine the shifts and trends within the standards development process, showing how protocol complexity and time to produce standards has increased. With these observations in mind, we develop statistical models to understand the factors that lead to successful uptake and deployment of protocols, deriving insights to improve the standardisation process.

    References

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    Jari Arkko. 2013. IETF Blog: Diversity. https://www.ietf.org/blog/diversity. Accessed: 2021/09/27.
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    Jari Arkko and Ted Hardie. 2021. Report from the IAB Workshop on Design Expectations vs. Deployment Reality in Protocol Development. RFC Editor. RFC 8980.
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    S Benthall. 2015. Testing Generative Models of Online Collaboration with BigBang (pp. 182--189). In Proceedings of the 14th Python in Science Conference.
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    David M Blei, Andrew Y Ng, and Michael I Jordan. 2003. Latent dirichlet allocation. the Journal of machine Learning research 3 (2003), 993--1022.
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    Scott Bradner. 1996. The Internet Standards Process - Revision 3. RFC Editor. RFC 2026.
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    Scott Bradner. 1997. Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. RFC Editor. RFC 2119.
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    D. D. Clark, J. Wroclawski, K. R. Sollins, and R. Braden. 2002. Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet. In Proceedings of the SIGCOMM Conference. ACM, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
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    Dave Crocker and Narelle Clark. 2015. An IETF with Much Diversity and Professional Conduct. RFC Editor. RFC 7704.
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    Heather Flanagan. 2019. Fifty Years of RFCs. RFC Editor. RFC 8700.
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    Christian Huitema. 2021. Evaluation of a Sample of RFCs Produced in 2018. RFC Editor. RFC 8963.
    [11]
    IAB and Leslie Daigle. 2007. The RFC Series and RFC Editor. RFC Editor. RFC 4844.
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    Heiko Niedermayer, Nikolai Schwellnus, Daniel Raumer, Edwin Cordeiro, and Georg Carle. 2017. Information Mining from Public Mailing Lists: A Case Study on IETF Mailing Lists. In International Conference on Internet Science. Springer, 301--309.
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    Mehdi Nikkhah, Aman Mangal, Constantine Dovrolis, and Roch Guérin. 2017. A statistical exploration of protocol adoption. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 25, 5 (2017), 2858--2871.
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    F. Pedregosa, G. Varoquaux, A. Gramfort, V. Michel, B. Thirion, O. Grisel, M. Blondel, P. Prettenhofer, R. Weiss, V. Dubourg, J. Vanderplas, A. Passos, D. Cournapeau, M. Brucher, M. Perrot, and E. Duchesnay. 2011. Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python. Journal of Machine Learning Research 12 (2011), 2825--2830.
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    Pete Resnick. 2014. On Consensus and Humming in the IETF. RFC Editor. RFC 7282.
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    Dave Thaler and Bernard Aboba. 2008. What Makes for a Successful Protocol? RFC Editor. RFC 5218.

    Cited By

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    • (2024)A Tale of Two Communities: Exploring Academic References on Stack OverflowCompanion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3651464(855-858)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2023)Will Admins Cope? Decentralized Moderation in the FediverseProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583487(3109-3120)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Design and evaluation of IPFSProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544232(739-752)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022

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    1. Characterising the IETF through the lens of RFC deployment

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        IMC '21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference
        November 2021
        768 pages
        ISBN:9781450391290
        DOI:10.1145/3487552
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 02 November 2021

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        Author Tags

        1. IETF
        2. protocol standardisation
        3. request for comments

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        IMC '21: ACM Internet Measurement Conference
        November 2 - 4, 2021
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        Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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        View all
        • (2024)A Tale of Two Communities: Exploring Academic References on Stack OverflowCompanion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3651464(855-858)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
        • (2023)Will Admins Cope? Decentralized Moderation in the FediverseProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583487(3109-3120)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
        • (2022)Design and evaluation of IPFSProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544232(739-752)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022

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