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Routing Area Working Group
charter-ietf-rtgwg-05

Document Charter Routing Area Working Group WG (rtgwg)
Title Routing Area Working Group
Last updated 2023-03-29
State Approved
WG State Active
IESG Responsible AD Jim Guichard
Charter edit AD Jim Guichard
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-rtgwg-05

The Routing Area working group (RTGWG) is chartered to provide a
venue to discuss, evaluate, support and develop proposals for
new work in the Routing Area and may work on specific small topics
that do not fit with an existing working group.

Options for handling new work include:

  • Directing the work to an existing WG (including RTGWG)
  • Developing a proposal for a BoF.
  • Developing a charter and establishing consensus for a new WG. This
    option will primarily be used with fairly mature and/or well-defined efforts.
  • Careful evaluation, leading to deferring or rejecting work.

It is expected that the proposals for new work will only include items which
are not aligned with the work of other WGs or that may span multiple WGs.
The Area Directors and WG Chairs can provide guidance if there is any
doubt whether a topic should be discussed in RTGWG.

A major objective of the RTGWG is to provide timely, clear
dispositions of new efforts. Where there is consensus to take
on new work, the WG will strive to quickly find a home for it.
Reconsideration of proposals which have failed to gather consensus
will be prioritized behind proposals for new work which have not
yet been considered. In general, requests for reconsideration
should only be made once a proposal has been significantly
revised.

If RTGWG decides that a particular topic should be addressed by
a new WG, the chairs will recommend the work to the Routing ADs
with a summary of the evaluation. The Routing ADs may then choose
to follow the normal IETF chartering process (potential BoF, IETF-wide
review of the proposed charter, etc.).

Guiding principles for evaluation of new work by RTGWG will include:

  1. Providing a clear problem statement for proposed new work.

  2. Prioritizing new efforts to manage the trade-offs between urgency,
    interest, and available resources in the Routing Area.

  3. Looking for commonalities among ongoing efforts.
    Such commonalities may indicate the need to develop more
    general, reusable solutions.

  4. Ensuring appropriate cross-WG and cross-area review.

  5. Protecting the architectural integrity of the protocols developed
    in the Routing Area and ensuring that work has significant applicability.

RTGWG may also work on specific small topics that do not fit with an existing working group. An example of a small topic is a draft that might otherwise be AD-sponsored but which could benefit from the review and consensus that RTGWG can provide.

RTGWG may work on larger topics, but must be explicitly rechartered to add the topic. The specific larger topics that RTGWG is currently chartered to work on:

  • Enhancements to hop-by-hop distributed
    routing (e.g., multicast, LDP-MPLS, unicast routing) related to
    fast-reroute and loop-free convergence. A specific goal of
    fast-reroute mechanisms is to provide up to complete coverage when
    the potential failure would not partition the network. All work in
    this area should be specifically evaluated by the WG in terms of
    practicality and applicability to deployed networks.

  • Routing-related YANG models that are not appropriate for other RTG working
    groups.

The working group milestones will be updated as needed to reflect the
proposals currently being worked on and the target dates for their
completion.