EEPG Terms of Reference

Thu Jan 27 18:26:18 UTC 1994

Since the issue of NANOG is going to be discussed at the regional-techs
meeting I thought it would be useful to have the EEPG ToR.  After I
dug it out I thought I'd pass it along.  I believe this was the initial
draft that Bernard published; I'm not sure if it's been updated (it's the
only one I could find on ftp.ripe.net).

--Richard

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                           TERMS OF REFERENCE 

                                  FOR

             EUROPEAN ENGINEERING AND PLANNING GROUP (EEPG)

                           Bernhard Stockman
                           December 27, 1993

    The European Engineering and Planning Group is the platform for the
    engineering and deployment planning of the European part of the
    Internet. The Internet shall here be seen in a broader sense not
    just networks based on the TCP/IP protocol suite.  EEPG will be
    active in the area of operational planning and engineering among
    various network service providers.  EEPG will work in close liaison
    with the Intercontinental Enginering and Planning Group (IEPG) and
    bring attention to IEPG key activities as relevant within the
    European networking environment.  EEPG can thus be seen as the
    European branch of the IEPG and European participation in the IEPG
    will be drawn from EEPG.  EEPG is open for anyone but is mainly
    intended for operational planning and engineering among network
    service providers.

    RIPE, being the organization for coordination of European network
    services, is the adequate framework for the EEPG.  EEPG will thus
    have the form of a RIPE Working Group and meet in conjunction with
    general RIPE meetings, currently three times a year.

    With the recent development and growth of the global network
    environment and the foreseen problems in maintaining an ubiquitous
    and homogeneous global network infrastructure the EEPG sees as its
    role to to identify and prioritize key activities of a technical
    nature which have a direct impact on the European and worldwide
    networking environment. For this reason EEPG will:

    - propose solutions for an optimized interconnectivity
      infrastrucutre among European network service providers with the
      ambition of securing maximal connectivity and flexibility in terms
      of engineering and management.  With the increasing number of
      international network service providers, the maintenance and
      improvement of pan-European and global connectivity is an obvious
      challenge.

    - propose coordinated deployment of basic distributed network
      applications.  The overall future of the global networking
      infrastructure is dependent on our common ability to evolve the
      collection of basic applications in the direction of enhanced
      quality and reliability of services.

    - propose practices and methods for efficient fault isolation and
      recovery as well as coordinated information dissemination in the
      area of network management.  The focus here is to advocate the
      necessity of basic common operational methodologies and procedures
      within each network provider's operational domain to ensure that
      the user community can be serviced with a seamless end to end
      capability with appropriate mechanisms to ensure overall quality
      and reliability of the offered service. This area explicitly
      includes Network Information Center (NIC) and Network Operations
      Center (NOC) interaction.

    An EEPG work-plan will be maintained describing current areas of
    interest and priorities. The work-plan will from time to time be
    updated and documented to reflect changes of focus.