February 2005 IEEE 802/IETF Liaison Report

Bernard Aboba
February 2005

Reviews In Progress

As part of the review of the IAB Link Indications document, a request for review was sent to IEEE 802.11. IEEE 802.11u will discuss the document during the Atlanta Plenary (the week after IETF62) The document may also be reviewed by IEEE 802.21.

The EAP Network Selection document is now in IETF last call. Paul Congdon has solicited comments from IEEE 802.1, but so far no comments have been submitted.

IEEE 802.11 completed their review of the CAPWAP documents a while ago. Work continues with 802.11m on defining aspects of the AP architecture. The work is being coordinated with 802.1.

New Work

At the Atlanta IEEE 802 Plenary there will be an RBRIDGE tutorial (misnamed a Radio Bridge tutorial in one announcement). The proposed TRILL and LOWPAN WG Charters have now gone out to the New Work list, and have also been posted to the IEEE 802.1, 802.11 and 802.15 mailing lists. So far, no comments have been received on the LOWPAN WG charter, but Mick Seaman of IEEE 802.1 has commented extensively on the TRILL WG Charter.

New liaison requests from IETF

The chairs of the BMWG WG have requested an informal liaison with IEEE 802.11T. The goal is to allow members of BMWG to review the portions of 802.11T that relate to LAN performance benchmarking, a subject previously covered by BMWG WG in RFC 2889.

Tom Alexander will participate in the work of both BMWG and 802.11T, so we have a live person to act as the conduit and help represent any comments. Tom is also the editor of the draft in “T”. Next step is to obtain access to the 802.11 archive for BMWG participants. Dorothy Stanley (liaison of IEEE 802 to IETF) will help with that.

New liaison requests from IEEE 802

A request has been received from participants in the WiMax forum for an EAP compliance review. Since the IETF does not have a liaison with the WiMax forum (which is not a standards organization, according to its charter) mail was sent to Roger Marks, chair of IEEE 802.16 to understand the relationship of this request to the IEEE 802.16e standard in progress (now in Sponsor Ballot).

Roger will talk to Brian Kiernan, the Chair of 802.16’s Task Group e, since that project has been developing (among many other things) some security enhancements to the published IEEE Standard 802.16-2004.

A potential request for liaison may be coming from IEEE 802.11r, relating to EAP Key Management. During the San Antonio Plenary, there was discussion of EAP Key Management requirements. A document was not approved by IEEE 802.11r, but some of the issues raised will be discussed at the EAP WG meeting at IETF 62 in Minneapolis. Also, there was some discussion relating to “Key Request” support within AAA, whereby a AAA client could request that a AAA Server return a specific key within the EAP key hierarchy. It is likely that this subject will also come up in the ICOS BOF as well as the EAP WG meeting.

From Dan Romascanu:

The IEEE 802.1 interim meeting discussed a proposal for the design of the IEEE 802.1AE MIB. This proposal was forwarded for comments to the IETF Bridge MIB WG list.

A new version of the revised SMIv2 Bridge MIB
draft-ietf-bridge-bridgemib-smiv2-09.txt
underwent a MIB Doctor review and discussions on the Bridge MIB WG list. Comments were also requested from the IEEE 802.1 participants. A revision including editorial changes to this document will be submitted in the next few days to the IESG for IESG Last Call.