GenDispatch Working Group R. Bonica Internet-Draft Juniper Networks Intended status: Best Current Practice A. Farrel Expires: 20 January 2026 Old Dog Consulting 19 July 2025 IETF Experiments draft-bonica-gendispatch-exp-05 Abstract This document describes IETF protocol experiments and provides guidelines for the publication of Experimental RFCs. 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 20 January 2026. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2025 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. Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 1] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Requirements on Experimental RFCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1. Codepoints in Experimental RFCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2. Requirements Level Language and Keywords . . . . . . . . 6 3. Experimental Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4. Progression to Standards Track . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 6. Operational Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 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 Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 2] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 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 RFC. 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. Thus, while the experiment may be run between consenting implementations over the Internet (for example, application layer experiments), this does not require the nodes within the Internet infrastructure Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 3] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 being exposed to the experiment. The required control, therefore, is that the experiment needs to ensure that the protocol elements of the experiment are not accisdntally received and processed by parts of the Internet that could be disrupted by that activity. * List what configuration knobs should be provided on experimental implementations * Include a date at which the experiment will be terminated. If it is intended that the experiment should be long-lasting or open-ended, this needs to be explicitly stated, and the reasoning given. This is important because the Experimental RFC should not be used to produce a de facto protocol specification by-passing full IETF review. * Include metrics and observations that will be collected during the experiment, and contrast the behavior with pre-existing IETF protocol solutions. * 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. 2.1. Codepoints in Experimental RFCs [RFC8126] describes guidelines for writing IANA Considerations sections in RFCs. It lists a number of assignment policies that apply to codepoint registries maintained by IANA. The ruels exist fo a number of reasons including the preservation of scarce resources in small codeplint spaces, the avoidance of standardisation-by-default without proper review and cooperation, and the "baking in" of codepoints into deployed equipment. Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 4] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 Experimental RFCs cannot obtain codepoints from registries or parts of registries that are managed under the following assignment policies: * Standards Action * Hierarchical Allocation An Experimental RFC may request and be granted codepoints from registries or parts of registries that are managed under the following assignment policies: * First Come First Served * Expert Review * Specification Required * RFC Required * IETF Review * IESG Approval Consideration must be given to the fact that the experiment may be temporary in nature and the protocol or protocol extensions may be abandoned. If there is a scarcity of available codepoints in a registry, even more caution should be applied to any codepoint assignments. Some registries or parts of registries are marked as "For Experimental Use: Not to be assigned." These ranges are specifically intended for use by protocol experiments, and this may be particularly valuable as described in [RFC3692]. But assignments are not made from these codepoint ranges, and Experimental RFCs must not document any codepoints from such ranges. Instead, protocol implementations should allow the codepoints to be configured so that all implementations participating in an experiment can interoperate and so that multiple experiments may co-exist in the same network. Where assignable codepoints are scarce, consideration should be given to using Experimental Use ranges rather than assigning new codepoints. Experiments may additionally use codepoints from Private Use ranges, but these codepoints are also not recorded Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 5] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 IANA may be requested to create new registries specified in Experimental RFCs. Experimental RFCs that would otherwise ask for the creation of protocol registries may alternatively simply enumerate the codepoints within the RFC. 2.2. Requirements Level Language and Keywords An Experimental RFC describing a protocol experiment may use requirements level language and keywords [BCP14] to help clarify the description of the protocol or protocol extension and the expected behavior of implementations. 3. Experimental Reports Experimental Reports may be viewed as reports from individual implementers or experimenters, and a more general collection of all experimental results. Individual 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 Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 6] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 Aggregated reports may be written up as the experimental period continues, and should be produced when the IETF protocol experiment concludes. Such reporting may be tracked through a wiki or via github (for example, on the working group's IETF-hosted wiki or git repository), or shared through an Internet-Draft. The final report might or might not end up published as an Informational RFC depending on its lasting value (especially in the case of the 'failure' of the experiment), but archiving the results in the Internet-Draft or through a web page may be sufficient if work progresses to promote a successful experiment to a Standards Track specification. 4. Progression to Standards Track If, after successful completion of an experiment, there is IETF consensus to progress the work for publication on the Standards Track, the completed RFC should include: * Notes indicating any changes from the experimental version of the protocol. * Advice for network operators on how to migrate from Experimental deployments to Standards Track deployments. 5. 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. 6. Operational Considerations As this document does not introduce any new protocols or operational procedures, nor define any architectures of protocol requirements, there are no new operations or manageability requirements introduced by this document. Authors of Experimental RFCs that describe ptorocols or protocol extensions need to pay particular attention to: * How the protocol will be operated and managed. * How the experiment will be configured and managed so that it can be distinguished from normal network operations and from other experiments. * How the experiment will interact with operations and management of other deployed protocols. Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 7] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 This material should normally be included in a dedicated "Operational Considerations" section of the Experimental RFC. Advice and guidance about the content of this section can be found in [I-D.opsarea-rfc5706bis]. 7. Security Considerations As this document does not introduce any new protocols or operational procedures, it does not introduce any new security considerations. Per [BCP72], Experimental RFCs must include security considerations as with any other RFC. Additionally, [RFC6973] offers guidance on writing privacy considerations, and while it is not mandatory to to include such material in Experimental RFCs, it is best practice to do so. Note that additional boilerplate material for RFCs containing YANG modules also exists and applies to Experimental RFCs. See [YANG-SEC] for up-to-date details. 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/ over the Internet. There may also be security issues with running an experimental protocol a long time after an experiment has ended. This might cause clashes with re-use of experimental code points or have other unpredicted results. A good approach is to ensure that implementations require active configuration to enable the use of experimental protocols (i.e., the experimental protocol features require the setting of a configuration option that is off by default). 8. 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, Paul Hoffmann, and Alan DeKoK for review and comments. 9. References 9.1. Normative References [BCP14] Best Current Practice 14, . Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 8] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 At the time of writing, this BCP comprises the following: Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, . Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, May 2017, . [BCP72] Best Current Practice 72, . At the time of writing, this BCP comprises the following: Rescorla, E. and B. Korver, "Guidelines for Writing RFC Text on Security Considerations", BCP 72, RFC 3552, DOI 10.17487/RFC3552, July 2003, . Gont, F. and I. Arce, "Security Considerations for Transient Numeric Identifiers Employed in Network Protocols", BCP 72, RFC 9416, DOI 10.17487/RFC9416, July 2023, . [I-D.opsarea-rfc5706bis] Claise, B., Clarke, J., Farrel, A., Barguil, S., Pignataro, C., and R. Chen, "Guidelines for Considering Operations and Management in IETF Specifications", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-opsarea-rfc5706bis-03, 7 July 2025, . [RFC6973] Cooper, A., Tschofenig, H., Aboba, B., Peterson, J., Morris, J., Hansen, M., and R. Smith, "Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols", RFC 6973, DOI 10.17487/RFC6973, July 2013, . [RFC8126] Cotton, M., Leiba, B., and T. Narten, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 8126, DOI 10.17487/RFC8126, June 2017, . 9.2. Informative References Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 9] Internet-Draft IETF Experiments July 2025 [RFC2026] Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, DOI 10.17487/RFC2026, October 1996, . [RFC3692] Narten, T., "Assigning Experimental and Testing Numbers Considered Useful", BCP 82, RFC 3692, DOI 10.17487/RFC3692, January 2004, . [RFC3933] Klensin, J. and S. Dawkins, "A Model for IETF Process Experiments", BCP 93, RFC 3933, DOI 10.17487/RFC3933, November 2004, . [RFC8799] Carpenter, B. and B. Liu, "Limited Domains and Internet Protocols", RFC 8799, DOI 10.17487/RFC8799, July 2020, . [YANG-SEC] IETF Operations and Management Area, "YANG module security considerations", Wiki IETF Operations and Management Area Wiki, May 2013, . Authors' Addresses Ron Bonica Juniper Networks Herndon, Virginia United States of America Email: rbonica@juniper.net Adrian Farrel Old Dog Consulting United Kingdom Email: adrian@olddog.co.uk Bonica & Farrel Expires 20 January 2026 [Page 10]