IETF | New transport technology

The IETF works on a broad range of networking technologies that provide the foundation for the Internet's growth and evolution.
While most IETF work takes place online, meetings and other events such as Hackathons provide in-person opportunities to advance work within the IETF.
The IETF is the premier Internet standards organization. It follows open and well-documented processes for setting these standards. Once published, those standards are made freely available.
The global IETF community works together in many different ways to produce high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet.
By supporting the IETF today, you are ensuring a free and open Internet exists tomorrow.
The development of new transport technologies in the IETF provides capabilities that improve the ability of Internet applications to send data over the Internet.
As the Internet has evolved, there has been a significant amount of work to develop protocols that more effectively and efficiently move data. The central role transport protocols play in how the Internet works is reflected by the fact that Web and Internet Transport (WIT) Area working groups often include participation by technologists involved in other Areas such as Security and Routing.
The QUIC Working Group has been developing a UDP-based, stream-multiplexing, encrypted transport protocol, based on pre-standardization implementation and deployment experience. Key goals for QUIC protocol are minimizing latency, improving performance, and providing always-secure transport that uses TLS 1.3 by default. Work on QUIC has been underway since 2016, with the first specifications published as RFCs in 2021. IETF has already launched multiple working groups to leverage the services that QUIC provides, including Media Over QUIC (MOQ).
Even well-established transport protocols, such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol), which have roots that pre-date the IETF itself, continue to be extended and refined to meet the needs of applications and users of the growing global Internet. One example is Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput (L4S), which extends the Explicit Congestion Networking (ECN) framework to potentially lower latency by orders of magnitude. Another is Recent ACKnowledgement (RACK), which modernizes the way that TCP and QUIC detect packet losses to allow faster recovery.
Another area of work understanding how to best make use of transport protocols to enable networking for devices with differing, and perhaps constrained, connectivity. For example, the DTN (Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking) Working Group specifies mechanisms for data communications in the presence of long delays and/or intermittent connectivity. More broadly, the TAPS (Transport Services) Working Group defined specifications for how applications interface with underlying transport protocols to improve their ability to use available networking. More background about transport topics is available in this presentation.