Wednesday, February 08, 2006

SPEERMINT Charter Published 

I already posted about the creation of IETF WG SPEERMINT, now the SPEERMINT charter made it officially to the IETF website into the new Real-Time Applications and Infrastructure Area.

For convenience, I post here the charte: the chairs, description of workgroup (scope) and the goals and milestones:

Session PEERing for Multimedia INTerconnect (speermint)
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Current Status: Acting Working Group

Chair(s):
Dave Meyer
Jason Livingood

Real-time Applications and Infrastruture Area Directors
TBD

Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area Advisor:
Allison Mankin

Mailing Lists:
General Discussion: speermint@ietf.org
To Subscribe: speermint-request@ietf.org
In Body: (un)subscribe
Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/speermint/index.html

Description of Working Group:

The term "VoIP Peering" has historically been used to describe inter-provider network interconnect and the delivery of voice calls over interconnection points. While voice calls are the primary motivation for this today, other forms of real-time communications are and will continue to evolve as natural additions to such peering. Therefore, the focus of this working group is best generalized to describe calls as sessions, and to note that that such communications are inherently real-time in nature.

SPEERMINT focuses architectures to identify, signal, and route delay-sensitive (real-time) communication sessions. These sessions use the SIP signaling protocol to enable peering between two or more administrative domains over IP networks. Where these domains peer, or meet, the establishment of trust, security, and a resistance to abuse and attack are all important considerations.

Note that the term "peering" is used here to refer to the interconnection between application layer entities such as SIP servers, as opposed to interconnection at the IP network layer. However, in order to achieve real-time Session PEERing, both signaling and media flows must be taken into consideration. In addition, the working group recognizes that there will be use cases that require SPEERMINT to focus on the interaction between the application layer and lower network layers, or the dependence of specific application layer use cases on lower layers, so SPEERMINT will have to be prepared to solve these problems as they arise.

More specifically, SPEERMINT focuses on real-time session routing architectures and their associated use cases. Deliverables here include the specification of the various types of application flows, such as signaling and media flows, in such networks, and includes both trunking and peer-to-peer flows. In addition, SPEERMINT considers and documents requirements for the feedback of operational conditions (e.g., congestion control) that enables the application of dynamic policy and recognizes that various mechanisms for achieving this should be studied as a potential part of any architecture. In future, as its initial work completes and the requirements become known, SPEERMINT may seek rechartering to consider various mechanism to support applying Quality of Service and/or traffic engineering mechanisms in an architecturally sound way in support of real-time Session PEERing. A charter discussion would consider how to work with with mechanisms developed by other working groups, selecting and integrating those, but as stated, first the initial milestones must be completed.

The most focused deliverables of SPEERMINT are best current practices regarding exchange of real-time sessions among VoIP and other real-time application service providers and, in particular, how such calls are routed. SPEERMINT will recognize that some of these
providers also control underlying access networks (facilities-based), while others do not (not facilities-based), and this fact may present various additional requirements or use cases for consideration. The working group will develop one or more use case documents to record the varieties of the practices, as well as use this recognition as a guide to maintaining the greatest possible separation of the application layer from lower layers.

The SPEERMINT work plan is related to and distinct from the work plans of the ENUM and SIPPING working groups. While the the ENUM Working Group is primarily concerned with the structure and lookup of data for the translation of E.164 numbers into URIs (RFC3761), SPEERMINT is concerned with the use of the resulting URI data, as well as non-ENUM-derived URI data, for use in signaling and routing of real-time sessions. The SIPPING WG produced the original document in this area (RFC 3824). The future work in this area will be produced by SPEERMINT, but RFC 3427, the SIP change process will be followed as needed.

Issues that are out of scope for SPEERMINT include:

  • Interoperability, and NITS/profiling of existing protocols such as SIP, RTP, and SRTP,
  • SPIT prevention. Note, however, that other working groups may release relevant specifications that become required or are referenced by various SPEERMINT uses cases and BCPs,
  • Routing of sessions which are not signaled using SIP. In particular, SPEERMINT is constrained to consider only those scenarios in which call routing is signaled using the SIP protocol and addressed by SIP or SIPS URIs. E.164 numbers and other national or private formats may only be used as defined within the SIP protocols, and
  • H.323

In the goals and milestones, "submit" means to submit the document to the IESG for publication.

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Goals and Milestones:

Jul 2006 Submit SPEERMINT terminology I-D (Informational).

Sept 2006 Submit I-D defining the SPEERMINT routing architecture (Informational).

Dec 2006 Submit I-D defining the message flows associated with the SPEERMINT routing architecture (Informational).

Jan 2007 Submit I-D on the use of DNS SRV and NAPTR records as specified by RFC 3263 (BCP).

Mar 2007 Submit I-D on the minimum set of requirements for SIP-based VoIP interconnection (BCP).

July 2007 Submit I-D specifying the use of strong identities in session peering and supporting the establishment and exchange of trust between domains (BCP).

Jul 2007 Submit I-D(s) on use cases (BCP).

Jul 2007 Propose re-chartering for any additional efforts/considerations, or propose conclusion of working group (following approval of last documents)

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