Minutes, SIPPING, IETF54

Reported by Dean Willis

SIPPING Working Group, IETF 54, Session 1

Agenda discussed -- no issues

SIP-T, Jon Peterson

  Slides presented include status review. SIP-T framework is
  essentially complete and currently in IETF LC. Tom Taylor reports
  that SG11 is working in this area and has sent some correspondence
  to IETF on the topic, and is hoping to finalize their work by
  November. Question for scheduling: since there is a dependency on
  tel URL work, when do we need the tel URL done? Jon Peterson reports
  that IESG has said that reference to tel may be informational rather
  than normative.

Status of Working Group Drafts, Rohan Mahy

  Three documents off to RFC editor -- NAI Req, SIP-T, and Hearing
  Impaired requirements. We have been in working group last call on
  call-flows for a long time and hope to conclude with next rev after
  this meeting. Question: None of the emergency stuff (SOS, 911, etc.)
  seems to be on the agenda as WG efforts. Is this intentional?
  Rohan's answer: The IESG has indicated that this needs to go thru
  ieprep. We have a joing meeting of 30 minutes for this
  later. Allikson Mankin confirmed this position.

Service Flows Open Issues, Alan Johnston

  Recent adds include several three-party scenarios. Open issues
  include use of SIP events, join/fork, and discovery of conference
  URI. There also needs to be more attention on the single-line
  extension flow and use of conference package.

Conferencing Open Issues, Rohan Mahy

  Design team met earlier this week. Slides present work plan for
  further effort, including need for set of consistent docs, migrating
  certain requirements to other groups such as MMUSIC, and isolating
  those requirements which should not be met using SIP. Scope proposal
  is to focus on tightly-coupled conferences controlled by a "focus"
  with a one-to-one correspondence with each "member". Must evaluate
  use of SIP vs. alternatives in these roles? Audience polled for
  reasonableness of scope, high level of agreement indicated. Proposed
  conference work plan documented in slides discussed, goal to deliver
  individual documents in September time frame. Question: How is this
  going to be aligned with the SIMPLE work and requirements for what
  needs to be done there? Ans. The policy-setting aspects of handling
  memberships to lists and subscriptions etc. is very similar to the
  membership properties of a conference. Identifying common
  requirements and possible generic solutions is a primary task of
  SIPPING, and we think this will come together as the work proceeds.

Assorted Draft Issues, Jonathan Rosenberg

  Conferencing Event Package: Open questions of scope and whether this
    should be subdivided into multiple event packages.

  Dialog Events Package: Recent changes defined a dialog FSM, has been
    moving toward XML schemas rather than DTDs. Defined "abstract
    dialog" for aggregated state monitoring of generic states like
    "busy". Several elements changed, and IANA registration work
    added. Open question: SUBSCRIBE now applies to all authorized
    dialogs, is it appropriate to do a version targeted to a specific
    dialog? Question: Does the IETF really recommend using schema or
    dtd in IETF?  General understanding seems to be that schema is
    preferred. Comment: There seem to have been some scenarios where
    single-call information was useful. COmment: The W3C has moved to
    discouraging use of DTDs.

  Registration Events Package: Original requirement was to support
    network initiated reregistration. This was generalized to provide
    information about the state of registrations. The draft now
    includes an FSM model of registration state. There has been
    discussion of the relationship between this draft and presence
    events. Author's view is that presence state may include a
    compositing of registration state with other information under
    control of a composition policy. Poll to adopt as a SIPPING
    working group item generally agreed. Comments in opposition from
    Sean Olson: This is a real world application, but should not be a
    SIP working group item -- at best, it is a P-informational sort of
    thing. Counter-position from JDR: Needs to be possible to
    distinguish registration from presence. Sean: The idea of
    standardizing interface between registrar and presence
    server. Counter from Georg Mayer: Since registrar's and presence
    servers may come from different sources, this DOES Noeed to be
    standardized. Question: If we're adopting this, when do we expect
    to finish this? Is it ready for WGLC? There don't appear to be
    technical issues, but further review is called for.

Message Waiting Events Package, Rohan Mahy

  Dates back to Pittsburgh meeting. Three open issues.

  1) Should the media types concept be replaced with message contexts?
     If you receive an MP3, is that a voice mail, an email, or an
     external reference or what? Comment: the context draft is now in
     the RFCED queue. Discussion: Message context draft addresses many
     issues of presenting sender's intent. It's mature and easy to
     work toward. Comment: This is a definite improvement, raising
     question of "how is this contect list extensible, what's the
     process?"  Answer: There's an IANA registration process
     documented in the context draft. Comment: this would also shorten
     the MWI draft and make it more crisp. Question: Should we add
     instant message to this package as a new context class using IANA
     process in context draft?  Ans. Sounds good so far, will discuss
     on list. Poll: Who likes idea of using message context instead of
     static media lists, result generally favorable (one objection
     noted, not loud).

  2) Should the syntax follow SIP instead of current restrictive
     syntax, including line folding etc.? No objections raised.

  3) If forking or state agents are supported, how do the responses
     get aggregated, and how is specific messaging account targeted?
     This has backward compatibility issues. No objections raised.

  Comment: There are probably scenarios where subscribe/notify is
  wrong metaphor as there is a lot of overhead in maintaining the
  subscription state. Is it reasonable to use otehr mechanisms?
  Ans. Maybe . . . for example, SMS might work.

Content Indirection Requirements, Sean Olson

  Slides discuss current requirements list. Open issues seem
  minimal. Question: When you send this to the far end, you don't know
  that it will be able to support the type of URL refernced. How do
  you know that the reference was acceptable? Suggestion: Use scheme
  parameter from caller preferences.  Counter: This is not a routing
  problem, it's more of an acknowledgement problem, so caller pref is
  probably not right. Perhaps we should have a baseline URI mechanism?
  We probably also need a way to report a refusal of
  indirection. Comment: this work needs to move forward
  rapidly. Comment: is there a requirement to not send an indirection
  unless there is knowledge that that receiver supports the scheme, or
  is it adequate to decline an offered indirection?

Request History Requirements, Mary Barnes

  Several requirments added in -02 rev, primarily relating to
  integrity and privacy protection. Question: is this sufficiently
  cooked to make it a working group item? Response: The concerns that
  remain focus on whether implementation of this stuff becomes
  required in order to interwork public services. For example, is a
  voice mail server built this way going to require people to "fake"
  history entries in order to interact with it? This may raise the
  need for a requirement that services that uses this mechanism be
  abloe to operate in its absence? Poll for adopting as a working
  group item strongly favorable, with only one vocal dissenter.

Configuration and Profile Delivery Requirements, Dan Petrie

  Slides presented discuss methodology of investigation and analysis
  of several potential configuration delievery protocols. Conclusion
  seems to be that SIP is best mechanism for enrollment and
  notification and that HTTP provides best mechanism for delivery and
  XML provides best container for information. Question: Do we we wish
  to make this a working group item? Response generally favorable,
  with two or three opposed.

Connection Reuse, Rohan Mahy

  Slides review ephemeral connection behavior and
  implications. Discussion requested clarification of some
  points. Questions polled on readership, comprehrension, and belief
  as to utility with generally favorable response. Question: Do we
  need more requirements to be able to do this? Comment: We need to
  analyze security implications carefully. Discussion on splitting
  drafts into reqirements, motiviations, and implementation, generally
  opposed.  Poll on adopting as WG item, generally favorable, few
  dissenters.

SIP AAA Requirements Open Issues, John Loughney

  Slides discuss assumptions an background. Comment: This seems to be
  focused on fairly traditional provider roles. We may need to
  consider different roles that occur in SIP. Comment: Thought basic
  idea was to put principal database somewhere else, so that nodes
  could run a protocol back to the database and say "Is this okay"? So
  what's the rest of this stuff? Comment: This is a start. It is not
  exhaustive, it doesn't go into a whole lot of things like
  settlement, but needs to be done. Comment: Settlement is outside of
  AAA. Comment: IETF should not get involved in charging and
  billing. Response: The "accounting" here is about
  recordkeeping. Question: Do we have to do all this before anybody
  works on RADIUS or DIAMETER or AKA or whatever behind a SIP server?
  Ans. No, that work will proceed separately. Comment: many
  requirements are in the form of "A SIP server should", almost like
  host requirements. This becomes a description of the sort of
  additional functions that need to be built into a SIP server for
  deployment in a real network. Comments: This is a major overloading
  of the term AAA, and unless we really are talking "RADIUS on
  steroids" we should be expressing it differently. Proposal: Rohan
  mumbled something about three different scopes and asked people to
  hum, then declared rough consensus on scope two and maybe doing
  scope 1 later or as a strict subset of scope 2 or that a solution
  for the space of scope 1 could be defined in the conext of scope 2.


SIPPING Working Group, IETF 54, Session 2

Agenda: Rosenberg and Baker talks reversed due to availability


Markup and Application Interaction, Jonathan Rosenberg

  Slides review origin of user input problem with DTMF. Prior effort
  has focused on use of RFC2833 for in-band DTMF, but this requires
  media forking and doesn't work for a lot of apps. INFO has been used
  as an alternative, but this usage is undefined and
  non-standard. Key-events is a step in the right direction, but
  incomplete. This is really stimulus signaling, where the user is
  interacting with an application in the absence of a semantic
  understanding of the application on the part of the user agent. This
  lead to the "markup" draft, thence to the "app-session" draft,
  thence to a largely undefined scope problem . . . .

  Comment: There seems to bea at least one "energy barrier" here. If
  the user thinkjs he is talking to a correspondent communicator
  semantically like another person that is on one side of the barrier
  (voice mail). If the user is running an application where the normal
  things we do with SIP are just aspects of the application, like
  playin "wuake" where some parts are doing sideband talks and others
  are rendering location and others are doing movement vectors, etc --
  that is, there is a larger application orchestrating more than one
  sip session, then that's something else. We may not want to deal
  with these two categories in the same way.

  Comment: This second category is not the same as that identified in
  the "stimulus" model described above. Response: We think we've
  constrained it right in the current draft.
 
  Comment: Morphing a functional protocol into a stimulus protocol can
  make some things wierd. Really, we're taking requirements from a
  stimulus model and attempting to apply them in a functional model,
  and that risks some complexity. Maybe we want to do something
  quicker and easier to solve the basic DTMF problems. Response: Let's
  look at what it will take to do it right first.

  Comment: Trying to deal with multiple applications concurrently will
  require a much stronger concept of focus than that required for a
  simple stimulus model.  We'l;l need to move there eventually.

  Comment: drowned out by chatter.

  Conclusion: We wish to propose a design team to tackle this. The one
  thing we seem to need to do is charge the design team with coming up
  with a solution quickly for the simpler problem class and "heading
  off" the info based systems soon is probably too critical to let
  slide. Poll takem on forming desigtn team met with string
  approval. Plea from audience: put interim findings out to list, not
  work in a vacuum.

IEPREP, Rohan Mahy, Fred Baker, Henning Schulzrinne

  Rohan: We were asked by ADs to have joint meeting between SIPPING
  and IEPREP becauseSIP is being asked to do some things with respect
  to emergency preparedness. We'll start by describing the arch of SIP
  as is likely to be appropriate to IEPREP. Many people think of SIP
  as a telecom protocol, but it's really an internet protocol with a
  different role for intermediaries. Most intenret SIP proxies provide
  message routing functions, but not QoS and other really stateful
  functions. The main things in the SIP architecture are the user
  agents -- gateways, ordinary phones, and application platforms like
  media servers. These are responsibile for "doing the right thing"
  with requests. If they need to pre-empt focus, or route a request
  into a priority queue, or request a special QoS, thenm that's what
  they do. They MAY use other elements to do these things, but have
  the essential responsibility. Clarification question from Henning:
  Are we assuming that proxies may nor may not drop call requests?
  Answer: Yes. Proxies tend to drop stuff when overloaded, and may use
  this as a mechanism for policy or congestion, etc. Comment, Oran:
  Proxies have to be DOS resistent. If they are, then they've fixed
  this problem to some degree.

  Fred: Start with big picture, then go into Henning requirement's and
  Dennis' telco perspective. Slides review making of calls in a hybrid
  environment, with the question being "What happens when you place a
  call?" Imagine we've had a disaster -- everybody picks up the
  phone. Most of us are just in the way, and we need those who can
  actually help to get through. There are policies such as MLPP which
  detail a prioritization scheme based on rank, etc. How does this
  work? When a call comes in from a PSTN, we'd like to be able to
  place that to an IP telephone, or in from an IP telephone, out to an
  IP phone or PSTN or whatever as appropriate. We must have
  information that allows us to classify the call within the policy
  schema. Example given of incoming call preemption. In the MLPP case,
  the call is simply preempted and replaced. For IP devices, we need
  to have some way to tell the device that the pending call is higher
  priority than the current call. This has nothing to do with the
  location of the SIP proxies, which could be anywhere.  With IP, we
  also have the problem of making sure that the important calls get
  the needed bandwidth if it happens to be scarce. This probably
  becomes something in RSVP or something like that. Three
  requirements: We need to "bypass" a busy signal, have a policy for
  admission and bandwidth allocation, and exchange such values
  transparently with PSTN. This requires one-to-one mapping with PSTN
  representations to provide for call tunneling cases.

  Rohan: The intent is for this work to become a requirements document
  from IEPREP to SIPPING. The current work is light on security and
  privacy requirements , and the following presentation will raise
  some.

  Henning: We will discuss security requirements for SIP-to-PSTN for
  access top PSTN resources. Key is access to end-to-end strong
  authentication and authorization. This depends not just on rank, but
  on role and criticality of the specific call in question. The risk
  here is not just fraud, but disruption of the performance of the
  overall system.  It is likely that intermediary nodes may need to
  participate in authentication/authorization roles, especially in
  delegatory models. In general we need to authorize any assertion of
  priority, not just assertion of identity (a given individual may
  make higher or lower priority calls). This is a classic cross-domain
  problem -- the principal may be in a different domain, and may not
  be able to rely on local-domain authentication protocols such as
  kerberos. We must also make minimal requirements on the capabilities
  of a given device. For example, the party may be using an ordinary
  civilian phone to try and deal with a major emergency. Question: How
  does this work from PSTN? Answer (Scott): In civilian world, user
  dials a special area code and PIN, requiring participation from the
  local carrier. Mil phones may have special buttons. The privacy
  requirementgs are also interesting -- for example, leakage of
  identities of parties in high-priority calls may leak strategic
  planning information, such as which ship is being launched. Other
  open potential requirements include 1) priority-sensitive routing
  vs. explicit routing through priority nodes 2) avoiding two stage
  dialing, and 3) discovering namesapces (which may have separate
  authentication concerns). Comment: Unstated metarequirement. Systems
  like this need ways of being invoked regularly outside of "real"
  emergencies, including full systems exercise, or the systems will
  not work when actually needed. What do we assume about IP network?
  Is it a custom built network, any network with a specific set of SIP
  devices (major firewall issues), or "any public network, any public
  device"? Clarification point: MLPP is an ITU standard and there also
  numerous national standards in PSTN. Comment: The "any public phone"
  scenario may actually be very critical. Process note: This is just a
  preview of the requirements document, but the final version is still
  being worked in IEPREP. We need to make sure that our feedback thru
  IEPREP is requirements based, not solutions. Need also to make sure
  that the SIP people do not ignore IEPREP and that IEPREP doesn't
  make too many assumptions.

  Closing questions: Question? Is the general 911 call in
  IEPREP's charter? Not yet, but then 911 is also not chartered in
  SIPPING. On the other hand, IEPREP expects that they will deal with
  all aspects of preferential calls. Comment: Reader did not notice
  anything about speech codecs in requirements. We need to make sure
  that "launch" does not sound like "lunch". Comment: In problem
  statement, what are requirements for location specific information,
  and how will this relate to geopriv? Fred: yes, maybe, depending on
  specific circumstance. Comment: Are we developing requirements on
  managing diversity, redundancy, etc. One view is that this is
  system architecture and implementation, and therefore out of
  scope. It might be reasonable for us to build an informational model
  of how one might wish to build. A second position is that there may
  be requirements that mandate reserved facilities, but that this is
  still out of scope for SIP/SIPPING. Comment: The requirements can
  really be divided into originating and terminating sides -- the
  general ordering a launch versus n-many calling the fire
  depertment. Answer: this is a question of the relative authorization
  levels, and it might be that 911 calls get bumped or
  vice-versa. Conclusion: We're really looking for something like
  call-waiting with policy and a formalization for the specification
  of that policy. We're supposed to be done with IEPREP requirements
  this week, or if not very soon.

  General discussion of scope and charter followed. Conclusion seems
  to be that emergency calls (for the regionally challenged read
  911/112 calls) are an orthogonal issue to that of the international
  emergency preference service. As a result, rechartering of SIPPING
  could be discussed to include Henning's drafts, and Henning's drafts
  do not need to go to IEPREP. Of course if someone really wants
  resource priority on an emergency call, then that would go to
  IEPREP, but that is not the subject of Hennings drafts at the
  moment. A similar division applies to GEOPRIV issues, where each
  group deals with its own requirements.


updated 17 Jul 2002 23:30 -0500