NITK Students at IETF: Fresh Minds for standards development

Welcome back to PING for 2026 and season 6. This time on PING, we have a pair of interviews with students from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal (NITK), recorded last year at IETF 122. This is the second time we've heard from students from NITK. We previously heard from Vanessa Fernandes and Kavya Bhat when they attended IETF 119 in 2024. NITK is a large, technically focused university located on India’s south-western coast in the state of Karnataka. The state is home to major technology hubs, such as Bengaluru and Mangaluru, alongside institutions like NITK, which play a key role in developing technical talent. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that NITK students show a strong interest in network technologies and Internet protocol development. Dr Mohit Tahiliani, Associate Professor at NITK, has led a multi-year program involving undergraduate, postgraduate, and postdoctoral researchers to engage with emerging Internet standards. Through this program, participants explore new ideas, contribute code, and take part in IETF hackathons and Working Group activities. This work has been supported in part by the APNIC Foundation. Last time with Vanessa and Kavya, we explored NITK’s multi-year campus IPv6 deployment, which has been underway for some time. That work has included direct engagement with the IETF, with Dr Mohit Tahiliani’s students attending alongside Nalini Eklins, who is involved both in the IPv6 deployment at NITK and in IPv6 standards work within the IETF. Since then, both students have gone on to work in networking roles or to pursue further study, reflecting the longer-term impact of sustained involvement in operational and standards-based Internet engineering. This time, we've got two different projects and NINE students to hear from. The first group is Rati Preethi Subramanian, Shriya Anil, Mahati Kalale, Anuhya Murki and Supradha Bhat, who explored fair queuing disciplines, FQ_Codel, a derivative FQ_Codel++ and a new proposed model, FQ_Pie. They worked with the NS3 network simulator and CCPerf, exploring how these queueing disciplines compare, and discussed their project with me at IETF 122. The second group are Vartika T Rao, Hayyan Arshad, Siddharth Bhat and Bharadwaja Meherrushi Chittapragada, who looked at the YANG data model in the network management space, and more efficient ways to manage data coming out of networking systems using YANG. They wrote a producer-consumer model in Python code, and explored time-series databases using interface packet count collections as an example YANG dataset to explore, in the CBOR encoding. Finally, I spoke with Dr Mohit Tahiliani, who has been leading this project. He is strongly committed to bringing new and younger voices into IETF work, recognizing the value of exposing students to real-world protocol development early in their careers. This experience benefits participants by grounding their learning in practical standards work, while also helping the IETF engage with new contributors who may return to protocol development in the future. This sustained engagement has already had tangible outcomes: The students involved have gone on to roles in the ICT sector or to further academic study, demonstrating the long-term value of this collaborative model.