In 2001, the IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force

The Internet Engineering Task Force 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...

 set up the pseudowire emulation edge to edge working group

Working group

A working group is an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers working on new research activities that would be difficult to develop under traditional funding mechanisms . The lifespan of the WG can last anywhere between a few months and several years...

, and this group was given the acronym PWE3 (the 3 standing for the third power of E, i.e. EEE). The working group was chartered to develop an architecture for service provider edge-to-edge PWs, and service-specific documents detailing the encapsulation techniques.

In computer networking and telecommunications, a pseudowire (PW) is an emulation of a native service over a packet switched network (PSN). The native service may be ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a standard switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and it encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from approaches such as the Internet Protocol or Ethernet that...

, frame relay

Frame relay

Frame Relay is a standardized wide area network technology that specifies the physical and logical link layers of digital telecommunications channels using a packet switching methodology...

, Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

, low-rate TDM

Time-division multiplexing

Time-division multiplexing is a type of digital multiplexing in which two or more bit streams or signals are transferred apparently simultaneously as sub-channels in one communication channel, but are physically taking turns on the channel. The time domain is divided into several recurrent...

, or SONET/SDH

Synchronous optical networking

Synchronous Optical Networking and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy are standardized multiplexing protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams over optical fiber using lasers or highly coherent light from light-emitting diodes . At low transmission rates data can also be transferred via an...

, while the PSN may be MPLS, IP

Internet Protocol

The Internet Protocol is the principal communications protocol used for relaying datagrams across an internetwork using the Internet Protocol Suite...

 (either IPv4 or IPv6), or L2TPv3

L2TPv3

Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol Version 3 is an IETF standard related to L2TP that can be used as an alternative protocol to Multiprotocol Label Switching for encapsulation of multiprotocol Layer 2 communications traffic over IP networks...

.

The working group chairs were originally Danny McPherson and Luca Martini,
but following Martini's resignation Stewart Bryant became co-chair.