PEP over TCP, or TCPPEP

Rohit Khare (rohit@bordeaux.ics.uci.edu)
Tue, 07 Apr 1998 15:47:22 -0700

Aaron Falk wrote in an IETF TCP over Satellite BOF report:
...
informal meeting was held with interested folks at the IETF
to work out some details. There was general agreement that
spoofing means different things to different people but that
it is generally a pejorative term. To allow the group to
focus on the technical issues rather than the emotional
ones, I am suggesting that what we are talking about are
proxies that enhance TCP performance. Therefore, I propose
that we call this activity TCPPEP for, naturally, TCP
Performance Enhancing Proxies. Eric Travis and I led the
discussion and Eric will be posting a summary to the tcppep
list.
...

Welcome to the crowd, folks -- here's another PEP draft that may actually make
it to experimental RFC status soon:

"PEP - an Extension Mechanism for HTTP"
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-http-pep-05.txt

And yes,one can say there is PEPTCP as much as there is TCPPEP...

ObWG comment: Per the Los Angeles consensus, I agree that there is value in
putting the PEP design into the RFC library as a sign of its maturity review,
and potential citation in future woprk. However, iut is clearly not standards
track anymore, but nor should it go all the way to informational; there is a
case to be made that Eric and Henrik's code and a wide variety of other
"end-user" applications at W3C justify the Experimental banner. The main
result of these experiences is "negotiation is hard -- so don't". Rather than
complex transfer of intent or policy, the new Mandatory- scheme just says what
to do; the PEP RFC should stand as a warning that "here lie dragons".

Rohit Khare

PS. Thanks to Lloyd Wood for pointing out this BOF report.