IP over InfiniBand
charter-ietf-ipoib-01

E-mail archive:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/ipoverib/current/mailli
st.html

InfiniBand is an emerging standard intended as an interconnect for
processor and I/O systems and devices (see the Infiniband Trade
Association web site at http://www.infinibandta.org for details). IP
is one type of traffic (and a very important one) that could use this
interconnect. InfiniBand would benefit greatly from a standardized
method of handling IP traffic on IB fabrics. It is also important to
be able to manage InfiniBand devices in a common way.

This working group has two tasks:

• specify the protocols and encapsulations to transport IPv4/v6 over
  an InfiniBand fabric.

• specify a set of MIB objects to allow management of the InfiniBand
  fabric itself.

The initial scope of the WG was limited to the use of the basic IB
Unreliable Datagram (UD) transport mode for transporting IP over
Infiniband. With that work mostly done, the scope has been extended to
develop an optional mechanism for transporting IP over other IB
transport modes. In particular, there is a desire to transport IP over
one or both of IB's connected modes, which enable the use of a much
larger MTU than the IB link MTU size. They also provide improved
reliability and performance through the use of link level orderly and
reliable delivery, and IB's automatic path migration (APM) feature.
However, care must be taken to ensure that use of an IB reliable
transport does not unduly interfere with the retransmission and
congestion control mechanisms used by higher layers (e.g., TCP and
SCTP).

Other more advanced functionalities such as mapping IP QOS into
IB-specific capabilities remain out of scope of the WG charter.

Work items

1. Specify standards track procedures for transporting IP over
   IB. This includes:

• supporting ARP/ND packets in order to map IP addresses into IB
  link-layer addresses.

• define encapsulations for carrying ARP, IPv4 and IPv6
  packets over IB

• Define how to transport IP multicast over IB.

2. Specify a standards track channel adapter MIB that allows
   management of an InfiniBand channel adapter. There will require that
   InfiniBand types be added to the ifType defined by IANA

3. Specify a standards track baseboard management MIB that will allow
   management of specified device properties

4. Specify sample counter MIBs to allow InfiniBand sample counters to
   be
   exposed to external SNMP management applications

5. Specify an optional, standards track encapsulation for carrying IPv4
   and IPv6 packets over either IB unreliable connections or reliable
   connections.