Subject: Successfully deploying IPv6 and SCTP with HTTP, draft-wing-http-new-tech-00

From: "Dan Wing" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:54:03 -0700

Until new technologies are well-established and working well, there
are times when the old technology works better. We see this in real
life when unleaded gasoline and diesel cars were introduced (before
ubiquitous availability of appropriate fueling stations).  We see this
with IPv6 where content providers are reluctant to put AAAA on their
primary domain because it harms the user experience for some users --
users with poorly-functioning IPv6 connectivity.  As we have all seen,
many workarounds for IPv6 connectivity problems say "disable IPv6".
Such workarounds are unhelpful, but the underlying problem remains:
when users enable IPv6, their user experience is often degraded due to
poorly-performing tunnels, broken IPv6 connectivity, or other reasons.
Replacing HTTP's reliance on TCP with SCTP suffers a similar fate, but
SCTP doesn't even have the benefit of a DNS record to indicate the
server is listening for incoming SCTP connections.

Taking ideas from ICE, draft-nward-6to4-qualification, Stuart 
Cheshire's comments a few IETFs ago, and other places, we have
recently published an I-D that proposes a way around this impasse
and allows browsers to support IPv6 and to support SCTP with
very little noticable impact to the end user's experience.  This
is accomplished by having the web browser attempt to use IPv4,
IPv6, SCTP, and TCP, with suggested delays and caching to offset
the impact to the network and to the servers.  With such a change,
the end user's incentive to disable IPv6 or disable SCTP is 
significantly reduced.

Our I-D is available at
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wing-http-new-tech-00

We have requested agenda time at the APPAREA meeting on Monday,
but would like to initiate discussion before IETF75 on the
APPAREA mailing list.

Thanks,
-Dan Wing
 Andrew Yourtchenko
 Preethi Natarajan