RFC 828

RFC 828: DATA COMMUNICATIONS, IFIP'S INTERNATIONAL "NETWORK" OF EXPERTS 🎀

Author: Kenneth Owen, IFIP 💅 Date: August 1982 🌸 Written for: IFIP, by Kenneth Owen, former Technology Editor of The Times, London 📰 Category, obsoletes, and updates: none are listed in this document's header, so nothing is obsoleted or updated here 🦋

[ This RFC is distributed to inform the ARPA Internet community of the activities of the IFIP technical committee on Data Communications, and to encourage participation in those activities. ] 💖

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Okay so bestie, data communications is literally the common thread running through almost every big advance in computer-based systems right now ✨. Connecting the parts of a complete system in new ways has become the driving force behind a huge amount of research and development 🔥.

In both national and international systems, new options have been popping up all over the place in recent years 🌈. These systems are increasingly built by people from totally different worlds: the computer industry, the telecommunications industry, national telecom authorities, and national and international standards bodies 🫶.

Computing and telecoms have converged so clearly that the new tech brings both opportunities and problems 😭. That convergence also demands an "interconnection" between all those different groups, which is very real and very necessary 💜.

The specific solutions will vary depending on the purpose and the part of the world, even though everyone is drawing on the same basic research 🌍. Global, regional, national, and local systems are all part of the picture 🧚. The tricky part is that systems are being designed while the technology keeps advancing fast, so there are lots of uncertainties about which directions to follow 🙈. Even so, international standards still have to be developed and agreed on 💅.

This whole background, a complex and rapidly advancing technology full of interacting parts, is what drives the work of Technical Committee 6 (TC 6) of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) ⭐. IFIP's membership is made up of the appropriate national professional organizations, one per country 👑. Its aims include promoting information science and technology, and advancing international cooperation in the field 🦋.

The broad field of information processing is split up for IFIP purposes into a bunch of specialist areas, and each one is covered by one of the Federation's technical committees 🍓. TC 6 wants to promote the exchange of information about data communication 💌. It also wants to bridge the gaps between users, telecommunications administrations, and the manufacturers of computers and equipment 🌸. And it aims to build working contacts with other relevant international bodies 🤝.

The committee's chairman is Professor Andre Danthine of the University of Liege, Belgium 🎓. "The main interest of TC 6," he says, "is to have a real exchange of technical information, on an international basis, in two ways which are completely intermixed." ✨ Basically, those two sides reflect what people in developed and developing nations each need 💖.

In developed countries, where tech is moving fastest, the big need is a full information exchange between researchers and professional practitioners 🔥. The research includes work on voice and video communication 🎀. The practitioners come from the traditional computer and telecommunications industries (which are now competing with each other in this area) and from the new "telematics" industry 🦋.

The second part of TC 6's work is the exchange of information with developing countries, and it completes that first exchange among experts in developed nations 🌈. "One of my main objectives as a technical committee chairman," says Professor Danthine, "is to try to keep a balance between meeting the needs of the expert, and the responsibility of the expert to explain the state of the art to people in the developing nations." 🫶

These "state of the art" or review conferences are a big deal in the TC 6 programme 💜. Each IFIP technical committee is made up of national representatives, plus working group chairmen (their work is described later in this article) 🧚. TC 6 is so strong that, when needed, it can put on full "state of the art" conference programmes with speakers from its own ranks 👑. Honestly, the committee becomes a technical "travelling circus" 🎪, and like most IFIP activities, the performers receive no fees 💅.

The technical committee plans the overall programme of events and acts as the driving mechanism for TC 6's activity 🌸. But Professor Danthine points out that the programme is normally carried out by the committee's specialist working groups, as appropriate 🍓. These TC 6 working groups are not small subcommittees in the conventional sense 🙈. Each one is a specialist community of perhaps 200 people who stay in touch by mail, including electronic mail 💖.

The working groups do a bunch of different things ✨. The first is basic, routine information dissemination between members 💌. Each working group has a distribution system that lets papers, reports, and notes get "broadcast" to the whole group 📨. It's much wider in scope and more flexible than meetings are, and it can be used to report research results before formal publication, for example 🦋.

The second activity is informal discussion "workshops," where a specific group of specialists tries to reach a consensus 🤓. These are often timed for a very early stage of a significant new technique or area of interest 🌱. The goal is to clarify the terminology and methodology needed to fully understand the subject area 🎀.

The third activity is relatively small "working conferences," which IFIP uses as a term for a meeting of invited experts where each participant presents a formal paper 📄. The proceedings are published afterward to share the results with the scientific world in general 🌍.

To reach a wider audience than a working conference can, TC 6 runs a fourth kind of information exchange: the "in-depth symposium" 🔥. As the name says, it's a highly technical open conference on a well-defined topic, designed to draw as big an attendance as possible 💅. For TC 6, the in-depth symposium is an annual event 🗓️.

Professor Danthine really stresses how broad the range of technology and interests is on his committee 👑. He also stresses that his members are interested in technology rather than science 🧠.

"We have very few people engaged in pure research in the sense that their work is not application-oriented. Even those who work in protocol verification have some application in mind. They try to find formal methods in a way which may be characterized as basic applied research. On the other hand, when advances are happening rapidly in computer science, something which is theoretical becomes useful very quickly." 💜

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LOCAL NETWORKS 🏠

Within data communications, no subject has gotten more general interest in recent years than local computer networks 🤩. The Xerox Ethernet system kicked that off with some radical possibilities 🌈. Within TC 6, local computer networks are handled by working group WG 6.4, chaired by Greg Hopkins of Ungerman-Bass 🎀. Meanwhile, Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, is the United States representative on the technical committee 🇺🇸.

Local networks are giving major "bandwagon" energy right now, with lots of people and organizations rushing to jump on board 🚌🔥. The concept itself isn't new, since local networks were implemented in Canada, the United States, and Britain in the 1960s 🦋. But Ethernet's appearance is what got the bandwagon rolling ✨. Ethernet's message was basically that new kinds of network structure existed, quite different from large-area networks 💅. Those new structures suited very high transmission speeds over rather limited geographical areas 🚀. Using these high-speed networks, you could reorganize how all the parts of a computing system were interconnected in a particular office, laboratory, or factory 🏭.

WG 6.4 wants "to organize interest and promote the exchange of information on networks of locally distributed digital computers," and "to develop recommendations for international standardization of local computer networking technology" 💖. A great example of this in practice was the international symposium on local computer networks, organized by WG 6.4 for TC 6. It drew more than 500 delegates to Florence earlier this year 🤯.

That symposium was TC 6's "in-depth" event for 1982 🎉. It covered topics like VLSI techniques, network reliability, voice distribution, LCN design and applications, performance evaluation, protocols, gateways, and standards 🧩. Ethernet got discussed in detail, along with "slotted" ring networks like the Cambridge Ring 💫. "Token" rings got the spotlight too 🔁. They were pioneered in Canada in the mid-1960s and are now getting renewed interest 🍓. One of the interesting developments reported at Florence was work on an advanced token ring at IBM's research laboratories at Ruschlikon, Zurich, Switzerland 🇨🇭.

Ethernet and ring categories of local networks are still very much up for technical debate 🥊. Then there are the so-called broadband networks, which are a third competing category 📡. They carry far more information, though at the cost of some logical simplicity 🧠. They also offer the prospect of combining cable television with interactive computer-based services 📺.

So right now is a time of intense marketing activity from the proponents of each technology 📣. That makes it a time when the fullest international exchange of information on technical developments matters the most 🌍💖.

As WG 6.4 interprets it, local computer networks are "local" because they're concerned with communication over distances between ten metres and 10,000 metres 📏. Their "computers" are the devices that require and provide data transmission, which includes terminals and large central processing systems 🖥️.

The "networks" can use a variety of transmission media, including twisted pairs, coaxial cable, fibre optics, and local radio 🪢. The ones WG 6.4 cares about most will use data rates above 100 kilobits per second ⚡. Among the group's major topics are the role of protocols in local computer networks, and how local computer networks interconnect with remote networks 🔗.

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MESSAGING 💌

International computer message systems and services are another topic that's developing super fast 🚀. Messages can be processed, stored, and transmitted between users who may be under the jurisdiction of separate carriers, computer systems, and/or computer networks 📬. Technical, economic, and political issues must be resolved if a viable international computer message service is going to develop 🧐. Within TC 6, this is the concern of working group WG 6.5, chaired by Ronald Uhlig of Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada 🍁.

This working group focuses on standards for data structures, addressing, and higher-level protocols to make international computer-mediated message services happen 🎀. Those services could have an impact on existing international postal and communication agreements, and on the economics of the worldwide communication system 🌏. Big stakes, bestie! 😭

To be continued in part 2! 🌈🦋

group's work are made available to users, manufacturers, common carriers, PTTs, ISO and CCITT. 🎀

One of the most comprehensive moves TC 6 and WG 6.5 ever made to shape international computer-based message services was publishing a set of policy recommendations 💅. They came out of a working-group workshop in Bonn in 1980, and the technical committee confirmed them ✨. They covered three things: the right to operate these services, restrictions on transborder data flow, and tariff issues 🦋.

Organizations should be free to operate their own computer-based message services and to interconnect those services for messages between organizations through public networks, TC 6 stated 🫶. (The goal here was to protect the basic freedom to communicate without getting into the more controversial topic of third-party traffic, which countries see differently 🙈.)

No restriction should be placed on sending messages across borders between persons 🌸. If restrictions were put on the nature of computer-based messages crossing a country's borders (like forbidding encipherment, for example), then the conditions should not be more severe than those placed on letter post 💀. (It was understood that limits on data crossing borders might seem necessary to stop people from dodging national privacy laws by using databases abroad. But the committee argued that the fix should be to rationalize the data privacy laws, not to restrict the data flow 🧚.)

On tariff principles, TC 6 recommended the following:

• tariff levels should not discriminate against computer-based message services, whether public or private
• there should be no heavy extra charge for international messages
• the principles of charging should not discourage the sensible, expected pattern of usage
• charges for preparation and sending of messages should be separated

(Here the background danger was that public-service tariffs might be manipulated to achieve unfair objectives, such as discouraging the use of new services or exploiting a monopoly 👑.)

Policy aspects like these are one of three main themes that WG 6.5 pursues within a formal structure of sub-groups 📚. The other two themes are the systems environment (overall systems issues of computer messaging) and the user environment (the user interface and all other aspects of user involvement). European and North American sub-groups work in parallel in each of these two subject areas 🌍.

"We started out with the realization that computer message systems were coming along very rapidly, with many different systems appearing in different parts of the world, and we could see the day coming when people were going to want all these systems to talk to each other," says Ronald Uhlig. "That wasn't going to happen unless we started to get people together. The first ones of the type we're talking about were on the Arpanet in the United States. For TC 6, computer messaging was the subject of the 1981 in-depth symposium which was held in Ottawa."

An important concept of mail messaging has emerged from WG 6.5's work on the systems environment ✉️. It divides computer messages, from the systems point of view, into two parts, known as the message transfer agent and the user agent.

The user agent acts on behalf of the individual user 🧁. When the user wants to send a message, they start by entering the user agent function. The "agent" is probably software, but the concept is broad. The user agent might live in a terminal, in a concentrator, in a PBX or in the network. It interacts with the user and handles everything up to the point of composing the message.

Then the user tells the user agent to send the message. At that point the message is in effect placed inside an electronic envelope and "posted" to a message transfer agent 💌. The message may pass from one message transfer agent to another before finally reaching the receiving user agent, which handles things like reading the message, filing it, and so on.

The work of WG 6.5's systems environment group led to the formal consideration of message-handling standards by a study group of CCITT 🔥. The CCITT group is currently concentrating on devising standards for the protocols used to transfer messages between message transfer agents.

"Once that becomes standardized," says Ronald Uhlig, "you've taken a major step towards allowing anybody's message system to communicate with anybody else's. Next we want to concentrate on obtaining some consensus for standards on compatible sets of functions in user agents. You can have many different kinds of user agents, like those which will accept only text messages, or voice messages, for example."

Another important development within WG 6.5, which is just getting under way, is messaging for developing nations 🌏. There are two dimensions here: national and international. The international problem is how to enable scientists (and in particular computer scientists) in the developing nations to keep in touch with their colleagues in the more advanced countries. An international message system could be the solution 💜.

Within individual developing countries, there's the possibility of using computer-based messaging as a superior type of internal telegram service 📮. People sending telegrams would go to a local post office to dictate their messages. Post offices would be linked in a message system, and at the receiving office the message would be printed out and then hand-delivered.

Dr. S. Ramani of India and Professor Liane Tarouco of Brazil are co-chairmen of WG 6.5's new subgroup on messaging for developing nations 🇮🇳🇧🇷. Dr. Ramani has suggested that India might launch a small satellite into a relatively low earth orbit, to be used for transmitting messages within developing countries (and possibly internationally) 🛰️✨.

Another subgroup within WG 6.5 might be formed to discuss messaging for the hearing impaired 🦻. This has been approved in principle, but it hasn't yet generated enough active interest to move ahead.

So working groups 6.4 and 6.5 have an active, continuing programme in well-defined subject areas 💖. TC 6's other two working groups, 6.1 and 6.3, are each in a state of flux right now as they review their scope to respond to changing needs 🌀.

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PROTOCOLS 🎀

WG 6.1 has been concerned up to now with "international packet switching for computer sharing" 🧠. It was formed in 1973 from the nucleus of an existing non-IFIP international network working group (which itself had grown out of a United States network working group within the Arpanet community), and it played a key role in developing communication protocols for computer networks 🌐.

The working group defined its original scope as follows. The group would study the problems of interworking packet-switched computer networks planned in various countries. Its ultimate goal was to define the technical characteristics of facilities and operating procedures that would make it possible and attractive to interconnect such networks. In pursuit of this goal, the group would attempt to define and publish guidelines for interconnecting packet-switching networks. Where possible, it would test those guidelines with experimental interconnections between cooperating networks 🧪.

So the mainstream of WG 6.1 activity has been protocols, an area where the emphasis has now shifted from the investigative research and discussion of IFIP to the follow-on work of the international standards bodies 📐. In 1978 an in-depth symposium on computer network protocols was held in Liège. In 1979 an in-depth symposium on flow control in complex data networks was held in Paris. The subject of flow control and overall network design is now regarded as having largely moved out of the research area and into commercial exploitation 💰. In 1981 a workshop on formal description and verification techniques was held at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England.

For the outside scientific community, WG 6.1 has been the focus for significant research and information exchange 📖. Within TC 6, it has also played a significant role as the parent of subgroups that have gone on to develop into working groups in their own right 👯. For the future, the intention is that WG 6.1 should continue this "umbrella" role, probably under a general "architecture and protocols for networks" title, with specific new areas being hived off into subgroups as appropriate 🦋.

One such subgroup of the new 6.1 could well be concerned with satellite systems 🛰️. At first sight it might seem a little late for a group such as TC 6 to start turning its attention to an established communication medium like satellite systems, but the committee has significant new variations on the satellite theme in mind 🌟.

"Satellites have been used up to now almost entirely to provide telephone channels," says Dr. Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory, England, who is the recently elected vice-chairman of TC 6. "What we want to do now is develop satellite systems that will mix voice, vision and data in such a way as to get the most use out of the channel. You can very often get the best use of the channel by mixing different types of traffic in this way. But you get these advantages only if you're prepared to design the multiplexing system around the requirements.

"Satellite Business Systems does this already to a certain extent. But I believe that new types of multiplexing schemes will be developed for satellites, which will make the future generation of mixed-media satellites much more powerful."

"Then there's the question: if you do have a satellite system integrated with a surface network, and then perhaps with a number of local networks, how do you set up the hierarchy of protocols to connect all that together, in a way that actually works conveniently? That's an unsolved problem.

"We know how to make a satellite into a sort of substitute telephone line, but what we don't know is how to make one of these rather more intelligent satellite systems work in nicely with the local network. That's one of the functions of the Universe project in the UK."

Another possible new topic that could come under the WG 6.1 umbrella is data security 🔐, which is the area of research in which Dr. Davies is working at NPL. It presents a difficult technical problem, a need for standards, and above all a need to analyze the user's requirements. Dr. Davies points out that ring networks, Ethernet systems and satellite systems all use broadcast transmissions, with obvious dangers of data insecurity 🙀.

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HUMAN FACTORS 💅

Working Group 6.3, whose title is "Human-computer interaction," is also being reviewed at present, for rather different reasons 🧸. The group was formed in 1975, re-formed in 1981, and has been concerned with developing a science and technology of the interaction between people and computers 🤖. It was concerned in particular with computer users, especially those who were not computer professionals, and with how to improve the human-computer relationship for them 🫶.

The identified areas for study included:

• the problems people have with computers
• the impact of computers on individuals and organizations
• the determinants of utility, usability and acceptability
• the appropriate allocation of tasks between computers and people
• modelling the user as an aid to better system design
• harmonizing the computer to the characteristics and needs of the user

Clearly the scope of 6.3 was deliberately set wide, with a tendency towards general principles rather than particular systems 🌈. But it was

recognized that progress would only come through specific studies on practical issues, bestie 🧚 like interface design standards, command language consistency, documentation, whether different communication media are appropriate, and human factors guidelines for dialogue design 💅. The chairman of WG 6.3 in recent years has been Professor Brian Shackel of Loughborough University of Technology, UK, who played the leading role in re-forming the group in 1981 🙌🎀.

The scope of 6.3 actually goes beyond any single technical committee 🌈. It's close to that of TC 9, for example, whose subject is the relationship between computers and society, and to TC 8, which is concerned with information systems 🫶. Activities that cut across boundaries like this can be organized jointly by working groups from a number of TCs, but for WG 6.3 the future status of the group is now the subject of an ad hoc review 👀.

THE FUTURE ✨

Looking ahead, Professor Danthine sums it up: "I think that the most important developments that are ahead of us will involve local networks, the digital PBX, and the concept of the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). It will be interesting to see what will finally come out of the various pressures, coming from different directions, for the same market. Some of the directions are technology-driven; some are marketing-driven. It is not at all clear what will happen." 🔮😭

"The role of TC 6 -- or rather the working groups -- is to act as a forum where experts can advocate, and assess, the various alternatives. We do not restrict ourselves to the view of any one sector -- the telecommunications authorities, say, or the manufacturers. We are much more open-minded, and exposed to the opinions of people who are not necessarily from our own domain of work." 🦋💜

One area where TC 6 is seeking a fuller methodology and understanding is office automation 🏢✨. "It is surprising to see that, at the present time, we are only at the beginning of a real understanding of office work," says Professor Danthine, "We have no model." 💀

So, after the modelling work TC 6 did on protocols, system architectures and messaging systems, the committee chairman says, "we are now doing some modelling work in terms of office automation, in order to understand what the problems are. Very often a solution appears for a problem which is not understood -- that is, not completely defined. That happens more often than you might think in computer science." 🧠🌸 Honestly, the main character energy of this whole thing is that you can't fix what you haven't defined yet 🙈.

The next two years will be important ones for data communication 📡💖. 1983 is World Communication Year, and 1984 will be important because of the CCITT Integrated Services Digital Network standards, which are expected to be announced then 🎉. These standards will show the telecommunication authorities' plans for their own "local networks" (by which they mean the distribution systems at local level, from the telephone exchange out to the homes, offices and factories) 🏠🏭.

Right now, this local distribution is done by multicore cable 🪢. In future it will be done by glass fibres, coupled with complex electronics at the various nodes ✨🔌. At the moment nobody knows what these nodes will look like, nor what the actual mode of transmission will be 🤷‍♀️. If the CCITT standards are announced in 1984, they will affect everybody concerned with "local networks" in the computing sense, and they will influence the design of the local computer networks of the late eighties 🔥💅.

These different threads of development in data communication are reflected in TC 6's programme of meetings for 1982-85 🗓️🦋. Planned events include:

• an international conference on data communications (a "state of the art" review) in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 1982 🌍
• a working conference on interconnected personal computing systems in Tromso, Norway, in 1983 ❄️
• an in-depth symposium on satellite and computer communications in Paris, France, in 1983 🛰️🥐
• a working conference on data communications in ISDN in Israel in 1985 🌅

TC 6 is also active in providing speakers for the sixth International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC '82) in September 1982 in London, England 🇬🇧👑. Iconic schedule, periodt 💅✨.

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Published by the IFIP Secretariat, 3 rue du Marche, CH-1204 GENEVA, Switzerland, August 1982. 🌷

For further information, please contact your National Computer Society or the IFIP Secretariat. 🫶💜