IETF Experiments

Status of This Memo

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

According to [RFC2026], the "Experimental" designation for an RFC typically denotes a specification that is part of a research or development effort. An Experimental RFC may be published for information and as an archival record of the work. An Experimental RFC may be the output of an IRTF Research Group, an IETF Working Group, or it may be an individual contribution that is sponsored by an Area Director or published on the Independent Submission Stream.¶

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. For example, 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. Alternatively, when a new protocol or protocol extension has been developed, but the community is not confident that the approach will be effective or is safe, it may be published as an experiment with the specific purpose of determining how well it works.¶

All protocol experiments must take care to not harm the Internet or interfere with established network operations. They should be conducted in a carefully controlled manner (for example, using a limited domain [RFC8799]). Furthermore, they must use protocol identifiers and code points that do not conflict with deployments of standardized protocols or other experiments. This guidance applies specifically to experiments described in IETF Experimental RFCs.¶

When an IETF protocol experiment concludes, experimental results should be reported to the relevant working group usually via an Internet-Draft, and may be published in an Informational RFCs.¶

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

2. Requirements on Experimental RFCs

An Experimental RFC must describe the experimental nature of the specification or deployment that it documents. Authors of Experimental RFCs may find it helpful to present this material in a specific section of their document, such as "Experimental Considerations." Nevertheless, the Abstract and the Introduction of the document must make it clear that the specification is an experiment, and must give some overview of the purpose and scope of the experiment.¶

An Experimental RFC should:¶

• Explain why the specification is presented as Experimental and not for publication on the Standards Track.¶

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

• Describe how the experiment is safeguarded so that it does not harm the Internet or interfere with its established operations.¶

  • It should indicate how messages or protocol data units are identified and associated with the experiment.¶

  • It should describe how backward compatibility is ensured by non-participating deployments using pre-existing standardized mechanisms to discard or ignore the experiment.¶

  • It should explain how the experiment is controlled so that it does not "leak out" into the wider Internet.¶

• List what configuration knobs should be provided on experimental implementations¶

• 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.¶

• Explain how reports of the success or failure of the experiment will be brought to the IETF, what information should be collected and reported (see Section 3), and possibly suggest a template for reporting experimental results.¶

• Suggest planned next steps if the experiment is fully or partially successful.¶

When two protocol mechanisms 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 should 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 Dhruv Dhody, Amanda Barber, and Murray Kucherawy for helpful discussions of experimental code points.¶

Thanks to Brian Carpenter, Michael Richardson, and Paul Hoffmann for review and comments.¶

7. References

Authors' Addresses