Roaming Operations
charter-ietf-roamops-01

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. Thus far, the group has produced an architectural
document describing the basic mechanisms required to support user
roaming, a description of several existing roaming implementations and
defined a standard username syntax to support roaming. A repository for
documentation describing current roaming implementations is also
maintained.

In the future, the group will 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, authentication and
authorization mechanisms and exploring in in depth the security issues
involved with roaming. This work is expected to consist mainly of new
or revised procedures and application-layer protocols, in addition to
recommendations for the fulfillment of the Internet roaming
requirements.

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, saag and cat) to identify issues to which the roamops group
should attend, as well as to assure that their work does not make
roaming unnecessarily difficult or impossible.

The utmost goal of the group will to make sure, by any means necessary,
that it produces documents of high quality that are useful to the IETF
community.