The Datagram Control Protocol working group is chartered to develop and standardize the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). DCCP is a minimal general purpose transport-layer protocol providing only two core functions: - the establishment, maintenance and teardown of an unreliable packet flow. - congestion control of that packet flow. Within the constraints of providing these core functions, DCCP aims to be a general purpose protocol, minimizing the overhead of packet header size or end-node processing as much as possible. Therefore, DCCP is as simple as possible, and as far as reasonably possible, it should avoid providing higher-level transport functionality. DCCP will provide a congestion-controlled, unreliable packet stream, without TCP's reliability or in-order delivery semantics. Additional unicast, flow-based application functionality can be layered over DCCP. SCOPE Drafts for DCCP, and several associated congestion control IDs, already exist. The first task before the working group will be an abbreviated functional requirement validation of those drafts. There are two possible outcomes: 1) The current DCCP draft is declared suitable for further work, with some areas listed for possible extension. 2) The current DCCP draft is declared unsuitable for further work, and more formal functional requirement exploration begins. Prior to the final development of the protocol, the working group will investigate areas of functionality that should be integrated into DCCP because they are difficult or impossible to layer above it. These areas include security and multi-homing/mobility, at a minimum. The protocol will be for both IPv4 and IPv6. It will not encompass multicast. It is strictly a unicast transport. For security, the working group will endeavor to ensure that DCCP incorporates good non-cryptographic mechanisms that make it resistant to denial-of-service attacks on DCCP connections and DCCP servers. A related topic that will be explored is whether DCCP can be a candidate to replace UDP in the transport of security management protocols such as IKE and JFK. The working group will also investigate DCCP's relationship with RTP (the Real-time Transport Protocol). Once the DCCP specification has stabilized, the WG will produce a document providing guidance to potential users of DCCP. The precise form of this document will be determined by WG discussion, but it might include example APIs, an applicability statement, or other forms of guidance about appropriate usage of DCCP.