In 1996 the IETF issued RFC 2014 to establish the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). It tasked this task force with "responsibility for organizing groups to investigate research topics related to the Internet protocols, applications, and technology."

"The IRTF focuses on longer term research issues related to the Internet while the parallel organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), focuses on the shorter term issues of engineering and standards making....

"The IRTF does not set standards, and thus has somewhat different and complementary philosophy and procedures. In particular, an IRTF Research Group is expected to be long-lived, producing a sequence of "products" over time. The products of a Research Group are research results that may be disseminated by publication in scholarly journals and conferences, as white papers for the community, as Informational RFCs, and so on. In addition, it is expected that technologies developed in a Research Group will be brought to the IETF as input to IETF Working Group(s) for possible standardization."

(IRTF Research Group Guidelines and Procedures, RFC 2014)