Liaison statement
The OMNI Interface - An IPv6 Air/Ground Interface for Civil Aviation

Deadline:
Transmission of liaison statement to the IETF:     3/27/2020
Presentation at IETF 6man Interim working group:   3/31/2020
Approve OMNI spec as WG item or AD sponsor:        4/15/2020
Collect and respond to community feedback:         5/15/2020
Submission to IESG for last call:                  6/15/2020
RFC editor submission:                             9/15/2020
RFC publication:                                  12/15/2020

The Civil Aviation community, working in compliance with standards being
developed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), is building
a worldwide IPv6-based Air-to-Ground (A/G) communication service supported by
the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN) using Internet Protocol Suite
(IPS) standards and protocols. It is proposed that Aircraft connect to the
ATN/IPS via an IPv6 Air/Ground interface (termed the “Overlay Multilink Network
(OMNI) Interface”) that provides a nexus for control and data message exchanges
over all available underlying aviation wireless data links. Aircraft frequently
have many data links and use them according to inbound and outbound traffic
forwarding profiles in a service known as multilink.

As an aircraft travels across network and administrative boundaries, it needs
to maintain seamless communication with its peer ground entities. The dynamic
network associations resulting from the aircraft movement creates route
convergence challenges. This challenge is further enhanced under multilink
operations. The aviation community needs a solution that can address this
network routing problem, called seamless mobility, while ensuring minimal
disruption and delay in information flow in both directions. This proposed RFC
is intended to provide the A/G interface supporting seamless mobility for
ATN/IPS.

In order to meet the performance requirements of aviation data links, it is
imperative that the aircraft keeps the number and size of control messages to a
minimum.

In the proposed RFC, each aircraft registers its Mobile Network Prefix (MNP) in
the ATN/IPS ground-domain mobility service over its active aviation data links.
This service is termed "prefix registration" (as opposed to "prefix
delegation") since the aircraft already knows its MNP and is simply asking for
it to be registered in the ATN/IPS routing system.

While the ground domain ATN/IPS network will provide a mobility service, the
details of the service need not be exposed to the aircraft. Instead, the
aircraft simply operates its OMNI interface in a manner that allows optimal
data plane usage while providing the ground domain with only the necessary and
sufficient control message signaling.

ICAO Communication Panel WG-I therefore requests the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) to enter the specification found in “Transmission of IPv6 Packets
over Overlay Multilink Network (OMNI) Interfaces”
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-templin-6man-omni-interface/) into the
RFC publication process. The draft specifies a new IPv6 Neighbor Discovery
option code and format that must be established through standards-track RFC
publication with appropriate IANA actions. This liaison statement recognizes
the IETF as the correct home for the work, with the expectation that the
document will evolve through both IETF and ICAO technical input the same as for
any Internet Draft. The following target publication milestones are requested:

Transmission of liaison statement to the IETF:     3/27/2020
Presentation at IETF 6man Interim working group:   3/31/2020
Approve OMNI spec as wg item or AD sponsor:        4/15/2020
Collect and respond to community feedback:         5/15/2020
Submission to IESG for last call:                  6/15/2020
RFC editor submission:                             9/15/2020
RFC publication:                                   12/15/2020