research-article

Characterising the IETF through the lens of RFC deployment

Authors:

Stephen McQuistin,

Prashant Khare,

Matthew Purver,

Patrick Healey,

Junaid Qadir, and

Ignacio CastroAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference

November 2021

Pages 137 - 149

https://doi.org/10.1145/3487552.3487821

Published: 02 November 2021 Publication History

Abstract

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.

[2]

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.

Digital Library

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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.

Digital Library

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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.

[10]

Christian Huitema. 2021. Evaluation of a Sample of RFCs Produced in 2018. RFC Editor. RFC 8963.

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IAB and Leslie Daigle. 2007. The RFC Series and RFC Editor. RFC Editor. RFC 4844.

[12]

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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Cited By

Huang RChattopadhyay SChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589335.3651464
Anaobi IRaman ACastro IZia HIbosiola DTyson G(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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583487
Trautwein DRaman ATyson GCastro IScott WSchubotz MGipp BPsaras YKuipers FOrda A(2022)Design and evaluation of IPFSProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544232(739-752)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544232

Index Terms

Characterising the IETF through the lens of RFC deployment
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
    1. Network protocol design
2. Social and professional topics
  1. User characteristics

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference

November 2021

768 pages

ISBN:9781450391290

DOI:10.1145/3487552

General Chairs:
Dave Levin
University of Maryland
,
Alan Mislove
Northeastern University
,
Program Chairs:
Johanna Amann
International Computer Science Institute
,
Matthew Luckie
University of Waikato

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

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Published: 02 November 2021

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November 2 - 4, 2021

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Cited By

Huang RChattopadhyay SChua TNgo CKa-Wei Lee RKumar RLauw H(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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589335.3651464
Anaobi IRaman ACastro IZia HIbosiola DTyson G(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
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583487
Trautwein DRaman ATyson GCastro IScott WSchubotz MGipp BPsaras YKuipers FOrda A(2022)Design and evaluation of IPFSProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544232(739-752)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544216.3544232

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