Roaming Operations (roamops) Charter


NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 37th IETF Meeting in San Jose. It may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.

Chair(s)

Operational Requirements Area Director(s):

Area Advisor

Mailing List Information

Description of Working Group

The purpose of this group is to develop or adopt procedures, mechanisms and protocols to support user roaming among groups of Internet service providers (ISPs). This is different from, but related to, the work of the IP Routing for Wireless/Mobile Hosts Working Group (mobileip) in that the roamops group is not concerned with the movement of hosts or subnets, but of users. In the near term, the goals of the group will be to produce an Informational RFC describing existing roaming implementations and an architectural document describing the basic mechanisms required to support user roaming. The group will use draft-zorn-dial-roam-req-01.txt as a starting point for the latter document. In addition, a repository for documentation describing current roaming implementations will be maintained.

In the longer term, the group may address interoperability among ISPs and roaming users by standardizing such items as network usage data exchange (including the content, format and protocols involved), phone book attributes and exchange/update protocols, inter-ISP authentication mechanisms and exploring in depth the security issues involved with roaming. This work is expected to consist mainly of new or revised procedures and application-layer protocols.

Any and all business issues regarding the operation of an ISP roaming network (such as settlement, business and billing methods) are specifically NOT in the scope of the roamops Working Group and will not be discussed.

The group will work closely with other IETF Working Groups (including mobileip, radius, nasreqng and cat) to identify issues to which the roamops group should attend, as well as to assure their work does not make roaming unnecessarily difficult or impossible.

Goals and Milestones

Nov 96
Re-submit existing Internet-Drafts as work of the ROAMOPS Working Group
Jan 97
Submit Internet-Drafts to IESG for publication as RFCs
Jan 97
Review the charter for additional work required

Current Internet-Drafts

No Request for Comments