Name:Fast Notification for Traffic Engineering and Load Balancing

Description

Optimal routing requires more than topology awareness. Real-time, reliable notification of network conditions is essential to enable adaptive, intelligent path selection, detect degraded or high-cost links, and identify congestion hotspots. The Fast Notification for Traffic Engineering and Load Balancing (FANTEL) BoF will examine the use cases to perform gap analysis and identify the problem statement and requirements for such real-time signaling to convey dynamic network state. The goal is to enable faster restoration, improve the responsiveness of traffic engineering, and enhance load balancing across diverse topologies.
The BoF seeks to highlight the problem space and bring together a community of interested participants to evaluate agreement on the use cases and requirements. A key objective is to assess whether there is sufficient interest to pursue technical work within the IETF.

Required Details

• Status: non-WG Forming
• Responsible AD: Ketan Talaulikar
• BOF proponents: Xuesong Geng <gengxuesong@huawei.com>, Tianran Zhou <zhoutianran@huawei.com>, Dan Li <tolidan@tsinghua.edu.cn>, PengFei Huo <huopengfei@bytedance.com>, Weiqiang Cheng <chengweiqiang@chinamobile.com>, Yongqing Zhu <zhuyq8@chinatelecom.cn>, Chang Cao <caoc15@chinaunicom.cn>
• Number of people expected to attend: 100
• Length of session: 2 hours
• Conflicts (whole Areas and/or WGs):RTG Area, srv6ops, mboned
• Chair Conflicts: Yingzhen Qu, TBD
• Technology Overlap: Traffic Engineering, Load Balancing, Failure Protection, Congestion Avoidance
• Key Participant Conflict: Jeffery Zhang, Jie Dong

Information for IAB/IESG

Ongoing efforts in adaptive and perceptive routing are being explored in WGs like RTGWG, LSR, and IDR. These efforts have been substantially triggered by discussion of routing within Data Centers (DCs), especially those with highly redundant topologies, while wider applicability in scenarios (such as DC interconnect) has also attracted interest.

However, these efforts are scattered across different WGs without sufficient alignment, and there appears to be no agreement on terminology, solutions, or standard requirements in this topic. These different viewpoints have been visible in discussions in RTGWG and a series of side meetings.

At the IETF 122 FANTEL side meeting, we brought together a diverse set of participants, including OTTs, vendors, service providers, and academic researchers. The discussion covered key topics such as use cases, gap analysis, and potential solutions related to fast notification for traffic engineering and load balancing. We believe this reflects strong community interest and a willingness to contribute to this work.

We plan to discuss in the BoF, to determine:
- The problem statement based on review of use cases and gap analysis
- Requirements that are proposed to be tackled at the IETF

Agenda

• Fantel Problem Statement:Use Case & Gap Analysis
• Fantel Requirements

Links to the mailing list, draft charter if any, relevant Internet-Drafts, etc.

• Mailing List: https://mailman3.ietf.org/mailman3/lists/fantel.ietf.org/
• Relevant Internet-Drafts:
  • Requirements: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-geng-fantel-fantel-requirements-00.txt
  • Gap Analysis: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-geng-fantel-fantel-gap-analysis/
  • State of the art:https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-dong-fantel-state-of-art