IETF Experiments

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶

This Internet-Draft will expire on 3 January 2025.¶

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2024 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Experimental RFCs in the IETF Stream describe IETF experiments. IETF process experiments are described in [RFC3933], but this document is concerned with protocol experiments.¶

An IETF protocol experiment is a procedure that is executed on the Internet for a bounded period of time. The experiment can, but does not always, include the deployment of a new protocol or protocol extension. When two protocols are proposed to solve a single problem, the IETF can initiate an experiment in which each protocol is deployed. Operational experience obtained during the experiments can help to determine which, if either, of the protocols should be progressed to the standards track.¶

An IETF experiment must not harm the Internet or interfere with established network operations. It must be conducted in a carefully controlled manner (for example, using a limited domain [RFC8799]). Furthermore, it must use protocol identifiers that do not conflict with other protocols or experiments.¶

When an IETF protocol experiment concludes, experimental results should be reported in one or more informational RFCs.¶

This document describes IETF protocol experiments and provides guidelines for the publication of Experimental RFCs. Experimental RFCs in the Independent Submissions Stream are out of scope of this document.¶

2. Requirements on Experimental RFCs

An Experimental RFC must:¶

• Describe the experiment in details, so that it can be replicated by non-collaborating parties and recognised when it is seen in deployments.¶

• Describe an experiment that does not harm the Internet or interfere with its established operations.¶

• Include a date at which the experiment will be terminated.¶

• Include metrics and observations that will be collected during the experiment.¶

• Include criteria by which success of the experiment will be determined.¶

When two protocols are proposed to solve a single problem, the IETF can initiate an experiment in which each protocol is deployed. In this case, the same metrics should be collected in each experiment.¶

3. Experimental Reports

Experimental Reports shoul include the following information:¶

• Scale of deployment¶

• Effort required to deploy¶

  • Was deployment incremental or network-wide?¶

  • Was there a need to synchronize configurations at each node or could nodes be configured independently¶

  • Did the deployment require hardware upgrade?¶

• Effort required to secure¶

• Performance impact of risk mitigation¶

• Effectiveness of risk mitigation¶

• Cost of risk mitigation¶

• Interoperability¶

• Did you deploy two inter-operable implementations?¶

• Did you experience interoperability problems?¶

• Effectiveness and sufficiency of OAM mechanism¶

4. IANA Considerations

This document does not make any requests of IANA, but see Section 2.1 for details of the use of codepoints in Experimental RFCs.¶

5. Security Considerations

As this document does not introduce any new protocols or operational procedures, it does not introduce any new security considerations¶

Experimental RFCs must include security and privacy considerations as with any other RFC. As well as considering the security and privacy implications of the protocol or protocol extensions, Experimental RFCs should examine the implications for security and privacy of running an experiment on the Internet.¶

6. Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge TBD for their review and helpful comments.¶

Authors' Addresses