A Recap of IETF 96
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting, hosted in July 2016, concluded with a wealth of discussion and activity aimed at furthering the goal of improving Internet efficiency by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use and manage the Internet.
Attendance at IETF 96 was unprecedented, including more than 1462 participants from 62 countries (more countries than ever before) including 316 first time attendees. During the meeting 12 new working group proposals were proposed, and it is estimated that over half of these groups will be approved as formal working groups. This year’s meeting also saw fair share of highlights, including the launch of a new and unique mentoring program and the annual Hackathon, which are highlighted with other details below. You can watch the full recap of IETF 96 here:
“This meeting was also the first for our new mentoring system. Volunteers from the IETF attendees had set up 50 mentors helping new people find their way in the IETF, for instance to establish contacts with other people. For me, an important part of the meeting is the ability to interact with other people building devices in the Internet. Specifications aside, these interactions are a crucial part of setting up new, interoperable technology to the Internet,” said Jari Arkko, IETF Chair.
The annual IETF Hackathon encourages developers to collaborate and develop utilities, ideas, sample code and solutions that show practical implementations of IETF standards. This year, IETF 96 was kicked off with the Hackathon. “There is growing engagement between the Open Source communities and the IETF. The IETF Hackathon had more participants than ever and we experimented with having a place for it in the IETF Lounge all week.”
Additional highlights included work proposals related to the Internet of Things (IoT), home networking and multimedia communications from browsers. One particularly interesting work proposal was called Advanced Queue Management (AQM). The AQM work proposal is an “effort attempting to make sure that bad router buffering practices do not waste capacity. This group has a real chance of improving how responsive the Internet feels to individual users, even without increasing their broadband connection speed.”
In all, IETF hosted yet another successful meeting full of engineers talking to each other, implementers sharing experiences, operators explaining their needs, and many other useful conversations designed to progress and betterment of the Internet. If you’re interested, you can read more about additional meeting highlights and proceedings.
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