[PROPOSED] Web & Networks Interest Group Charter

This charter is under review by the W3C Advisory Committee.

The mission of the Web & Networks Interest Group is to explore solutions for web applications to leverage network capabilities in order to achieve better performance and resources allocation, both on the device and network.

Join the Web & Networks Interest Group.

This proposed charter is available on GitHub. Feel free to raise issues.

Start date	[dd monthname yyyy] (date of the "Call for Participation", when the charter is approved)
End date	(2 years duration)
Chairs	Dan Druta (AT&T); Sudeep Divakaran (Intel)
Team Contacts	Dominique Hazael-Massieux (0.1 FTE)
Meeting Schedule	Teleconferences: A regular teleconference will be held, at least quarterly, with additional calls as required. Task Forces may have separate calls that will not overlap with others. Face-to-face: we will meet during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week; additional face-to-face meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants, usually no more than 1 per year.

Scope

The Web & Networks Interest Group's scope spans Web and Networking technologies that can enhance the quality of experience of web applications, by exposing Web APIs that consider factors such as real-time performance, network throughput indicators, and data transfer latencies while preserving security and privacy requirements, and by exposing relevant capabilities in network-profiling developer tools.

Topics and areas that are in-scope for the Interest Group include:

Application hints to the network (e.g. ways for applications to declare their operational wishes to the network). Specifically, the group will focus on hints that can simultaneously benefit web application and network performance (in general-purpose browsers, tablets, phones). For instance:
- Multipath, multi-carrier, multi-connectivity handling;
- Latency vs bandwidth tradeoffs, for instance high bandwidth 4K video stream, or low latency video call, etc.;
- Device power and performance balancing.
Exposure of specialized services such as DiffServ, 5G Slices, and Edge Computing, including load balancing computing between edge devices and the cloud, particularly in latency-sensitive applications like Machine Learning inference.
Exposure of aggregated web metrics beyond application developers and browser editors for troubleshooting and monitoring purposes: with the encryption of transport protocols (such as in QUIC), troubleshooting of network issues through the passive observation of transport layer data (such as TCP sequence numbers) is more challenging. However, web applications often have access to rich performance metrics (e.g. Navigation Timing API; WebRTC getStats API…). A new troubleshooting approach would arise if these metrics were aggregated according to the network topology, such that any interested party (including network operators) is in position to troubleshoot possible network-related issues.

The tasks that the Interest Group will undertake include:

Identify opportunities for network and application collaborations that seem likely good candidates for adoption, analyse them in relation to existing standardization efforts, and, when relevant, build the case for additional or prioritized standardization.
Liaise and coordinate with relevant networking standards organizations (esp. 3GPP, IETF) to track their activities and provide them with relevant use cases and requirements from web applications.
Share the latest developments in networking standardization bodies, comprised of telecommunication network system vendors and network operators, with the ecosystem of web browsers and web application developers.
Propose incubation of new work to identify network-related parameters from different web applications' requirements, that can impact the applications networking performance. Also, consider work on exposing new Web APIs and new Control Messaging between device and network, to leverage various elements in the networking path to improve user experience.
Represent knowledge about networking technologies and gather data about network deployments to support web browser developer tools for profiling and performance analysis under various network conditions.
Provide guidelines to browser developers on how to improve web browser developer tools to profile application user experience impact under different network conditions using new pre-defined simulation models.
Provide guidelines to web application developers on evaluating trade-offs between compute on edge devices versus on cloud for computation-centric operations, to improve quality of experience under different radio access type and quality conditions.

The Interest Group also provides use cases and requirements to guide other groups at W3C.

Out of Scope

The technical development of standards is not in scope for the Interest Group. Technical specification discussions are expected to take place within the appropriate W3C groups if such a group exists, or within a dedicated Community Group or Business Group when incubation is needed.

Success Criteria

The Interest Group will have succeeded if it can achieve the following:

Participation from various stakeholder communities, including browser vendors, media professionals, cloud providers, hardware and software developers, telecommunications companies, cable operators, application developers, regulators, and users.
Members of the Interest Group join relevant W3C Groups and drive the development of work items.
Engagement and coordination with other organizations in the Telecommunications, Media and Internet industries to recommend and coordinate technical standards development and promote adherence to W3C and/or other standards.

Deliverables

The primary deliverables of the Web & Networks Interest Group are IG Notes that identify requirements for existing and/or new technical specifications and gaps in the Web Platform.
The group will also maintain a public list of the network-related features on the Web that it is tracking and investigating. These features will include identified gaps, stable features deployed in browser implementations, as well as features under development in W3C and external groups.

Normative Specifications

The Interest Group will not deliver any normative specifications.

Other Deliverables

Other non-normative documents may be created such as:

Primer or Best Practice documents to support web developers when designing applications.

Timeline

The IG will, during its lifetime, undertake different activities that may proceed in parallel. No specific timeline has been identified at this point; the group expects to take an iterative approach to identify which activities are most likely to be most impactful.

Coordination

For all Notes or other deliverables, this Interest Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, performance, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG.

Each Note or transmission of proposed work should contain a section detailing all known security and privacy implications for implementers, Web authors, and end users.

Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:

W3C Groups

Web Real-Time Communications Working Group: The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group works on the WebRTC Next Version (WebRTC-NV). The Web & Networks IG should coordinate with this group to ensure the next version use cases can be implemented efficiently considering requirements on the networks such as exchange of large files without disruption to audio/video sessions, maintain a long-term connection and seek to minimize power consumption. Secondarily, explore implications of the new transport protocols such as the QUIC.
Devices and Sensors Working Group and Web Incubator Community Group: The Devices and Sensors Working Group (DAS WG) defines client-side APIs that enable the development of Web Applications that interact with device hardware and sensors. Network Information API incubation enables web applications to access information about the network connection in use by the device and Priority Hints incubation provide developers with the control to indicate a resource's relative importance to the browser. The Web & Networks IG can propose new features and enhancements for these API. The Generic Sensor API defines a framework for exposing sensor data to the web platform in a consistent way. Sensors produce high frequency data that sets low latency requirements for delivery over the network.
Machine Learning for the Web Community Group: The Machine Learning for the Web Community Group incubates an API for machine learning inference in the browser. The Web & Networks IG should coordinate with this group to explore on how to load balance computing between cloud-based and client-side machine learning using network hints including bandwidth and latency, radio power consumption, and available computing power and battery on the client.
Media and Entertainment Interest Group: The Media and Entertainment Interest Group's scope covers Web technologies used in the end-to-end pipeline — including capture, production, distribution and consumption — of continuous media and their associated technologies such as timed text.
Web of Things Interest Group: Web of Things depends on networking technologies on the edge and in the cloud when exposing interactions between Things. The Web & Networks IG should coordinate with Web of Things IG to ensure future Web of Things work can make use of networking parameters that may impact performance.
Web Performance Working Group: The Web Performance Working Group's scope of work includes user agent features and APIs to observe and improve aspects of application performance, such as measuring network and rendering performance, responsiveness and interactivity, memory and CPU use, application failures, and similar APIs and infrastructure to enable measurement and delivery of better user experience.

External Organizations

3GPP: The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) unites telecommunications standards development organizations (ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TSDSI, TTA, TTC), known as “Organizational Partners” and provides their members with a stable environment to produce the Reports and Specifications that define 3GPP technologies.
ARIB: The Association of Radio Industries and Businesses is aimed to conduct investigation, research & development and consultation of utilization of radio waves from the view of developing radio industries, and to promote realization and popularization of new radio systems in the field of telecommunications and broadcasting.
ETSI: The European Telecommunications Standards Institute produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, broadcast and internet technologies.
IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) develops a family of IEEE 802.11 standards that cover Wireless LAN technology. Some 802.11 features are surfaces through Network Information API including estimated max downlink speeds of various 802.11 generations. Other possible parameters for consideration include e.g. backhaul congestion and network switching time.
IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force is an open-standards development organization which develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. Relevant IETF work include e.g. HTTP Client Hints for proactive content negotiation.
GSMA: The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting more than 750 operators with over 350 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors.
ITU-T: ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector is the part of the UN agency ITU that defines elements in information and communication technologies infrastructure. Their work includes Multimedia Application Framework for IPTV services. For example, H.762: Lightweight interactive multimedia framework for IPTV services (LIME) gives a subset of HTML, CSS and ECMAScript for use in IPTV terminals.
MPEG: The Moving Picture Experts Group is a working group of ISO/IEC in charge of the development of standards for coded representation of digital audio, video and related data.
oneM2M: The oneM2M develops technical specifications which address the need for a common M2M Service Layer that can be readily embedded within various hardware and software, and relied upon to connect the myriad of devices in the field with M2M application servers worldwide.

Participation

To be successful, this Interest Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration, including representatives from the key stakeholders identified above. The Chairs and Task Force leaders are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Interest Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication.

The group also welcomes non-Members to contribute technical submissions for consideration upon their agreement to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.

Communication

Technical discussions for this Interest Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Drafts of its documents will be developed on a public repository and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.

Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Interest Group home page.

Most Interest Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular specifications, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.

This group primarily conducts its technical work on the public mailing list public-networks-ig@w3.org (archive) and on GitHub issues. The public is invited to review, discuss and contribute to this work.

The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

Decision Policy

This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 3.3). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.

However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.

To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email and/or web-based survey), with a response period from one week to 10 working days, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised on the mailing list by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Interest Group.

All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs or the Director.

This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 3.4, Votes) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Disclosures

The Interest Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on the topic addressed by this charter. W3C reminds Interest Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Interest Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Interest Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

Licensing

This Interest Group will use the W3C Software and Document license for all its deliverables.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 5.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Charter History

Note:Display this table and update it when appropriate. Requirements for charter extension history are documented in the Charter Guidebook (section 4).

The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.3):

Charter Period	Start Date	End Date	Changes
Initial Charter	[dd monthname yyyy]	[dd monthname yyyy]	First charter