Compression Encapsulation over IP BOF (COMPEN) Reported by Rodney Thayer/Sable Technology Summary Twenty-three people attended the COMPEN BOF in Seattle. It was generally agreed that there are situations where people have a need for encapsulation, such as compression. It was the rough consensus of the group that if a working group is formed, it should address the general issue of encapsulation over IP. There was some discussion of whether or not encapsulation over IP is a problem that is already being solved by PPP, and whether PPP provides solutions to encapsulation problems. It was established that there is enough interest to form a working group on Generic Encapsulation Over IP, and the COMPEN mailing list will be used to work together to modify the existing draft charter to reflect the proposed working group's goals. Presentations and Discussion One compression encapsulation scheme was presented by Matt Lukens (see slides following the minutes: Figures 1 and 2) and discussed by the group. The group also discussed more general requirements for encapsulation. Bob Enger (a user, in this context) brought up several requirements and provided some additional pictures (see slides: Figure 3). Several common points were identified: o Encapsulation of compressed data over IP is the right place to do this---it is essentially a routing issue. o Other groups have addressed the encapsulation problem in several different circumstances, that is, encapsulation is something that needs standardization. cisco has authored an informational description of their Generic Router Encapsulation protocol; there is a scheme for encapsulating IPX; and others are wrestling with this issue. o There is an interest in encapsulators being interoperable. Charter for Proposed Working Group The chairs of the proposed COMPEN Working Group will be Rodney Thayer and Matt Lukens. The group will be chartered in the Internet Area. Mailing lists already exist for the group. The general discussion list is compen@world.std.com. To subscribe to the list, send a request to compen-request@world.std.com. The archive of the list will be located on ftp.std.com:/pub/compen-archive. The following group description was written before the BOF was held: The Compressed Encapsulation over IP Working Group (COMPEN) is chartered to develop a protocol to be used to transmit compressed data over IP. The current state of compression technology has allowed the development of devices which provide the capability to compress IP data. This working group is intended to produce a document which describes a standard envelopment protocol that can be used to allow a pair of devices to exchanged compressed IP packets. It is the intent of the working group to provide a standard protocol that will allow different implementations of compression over IP (of which several are now in existence) to interoperate. There also is the need for the capability to support more than one compression algorithm, and to support other encapsulation schemes, such as encryption, when used in combination with compression. The group wants to provide a standard protocol for use in compressing IP data to solve the problem of allowing interoperability among devices that support compression. The intent is to solve this interoperability problem by establishing a common protocol. Currently, in order to transmit compressed IP over the Internet, the same vendor's equipment must be used on both ends. The development of a standard encapsulation protocol is important to the Internet community because the current state of the technology allows individual implementations to exist that do not interoperate with each other, and yet these implementations are present side-by-side in the Internet. For example, several parties are using Internet protocol type 99 to represent compressed data using different encapsulation schemes. The development of a protocol for compression over IP is not inconsistent with other uses of compression, such as within modem standards or link-level protocols such as PPP. This is because there are situations where users wish to interconnect two nodes through an internetwork and they do not have control of all intervening links, and therefore they have to transmit IP across the internetwork to connect the two nodes. The following goals and milestones were identified before the BOF session: March 94 Meet as a BOF and draft a charter for consideration as an IETF working group. Submit the charter to the area directors. June 94 Release a document as an Internet-Draft July 94 Present the Internet-Draft at the IETF meeting. Revise and edit the document as needed. Aug 94 Re-release the Internet-Draft. Nov 94 Submit the Internet-Draft to the IESG for publication as an RFC. Compression Encapsulation Requirements An outline of compression encapsulation requirements follows the minutes (Slide 4). Proposed Working Group Requirements It was the rough consensus of the attendees that the group requirements be modified to the following outline: o General tunneling, not just compression o Specifically address: - Compression - Encryption - No data alteration, just protocol, such as CLNP, Mobile IP, Appletalk, etc. - Dynamic negotiation - Fragmentation and expansion - Tunnel re-establishment o Address whether this is ``different'' from PPP over TCP (or something else) o Address whether this is different from GRE Attendees Larry Blunk ljb@merit.edu Caralyn Brown cbrown@wellfleet.com David Conrad davidc@iij.ad.jp Ian Duncan id@cc.mcgill.ca Robert Enger enger@seka.reston.ans.net Shoji Fukutomi fuku@furukawa.co.jp John Houlker j.houlker@waikato.ac.nz Jim Hughes hughes@network.com Jan-Olof Jemnemo Jan-Olof.Jemnemo@intg.telia.se Akira Kato kato@wide.ad.jp David Kaufman dek@magna.telco.com Sun-Kwan Kimn sunkimn@cup.hp.com Ted Kuo tik@vnet.ibm.com Joshua Littlefield josh@cayman.com Matt Lukens mlukens@world.std.com Gary Malkin gmalkin@xylogics.com Gerry Meyer gerry@spider.co.uk William Miskovetz misko@cisco.com Brad Parker brad@fcr.com Doug Schremp dhs@magna.telco.com Oscar Strohacker stroh@vnet.ibm.com Rodney Thayer rodney@world.std.com Walter Wimer ww0n+@andrew.cmu.edu