RE: What is a "session"?

["tim clifford" <tjc@lacunanet.net>]

so there are many definitions of a session?  i recall that mwif spent days
(months) trying to develop a definition of session but curiously I can't
find one in the mwif reference architecture - any other mwifers out there
familiar with its final disposition?  does someone have ietf, 3gppx
definitions?

Tim Clifford, President and CEO
Lacuna Network Technologies, Inc.
5257 River Road  #635
Bethesda, MD 20816
office: 703.812.8560  fax 703.812.8571
mobile: 301.674.0373 email: tjc@lacunanet.net

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-more@ops.ietf.org [mailto:owner-more@ops.ietf.org]On Behalf
> Of John G. Waclawsky
> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 9:11 AM
> To: Erik Nordmark
> Cc: more@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: Re: What is a "session"?
>
>
> This is an interesting discussion point. When I think of a
> browser, which is
> what many of us may be thinking when we are considering the
> "wireless web",
> the old concept of a session, used by the OSI model, is merely one of many
> “threads” of information flow to get the user a “completed” Web
> page. In this
> sense the “super transaction” of assembling dynamic and static
> content is what
> the user would view as his “transaction” or unit of work.
> Processing to satisfy
> Web page assembly is typically distributed around the network. It
> begins with
> clicking on a URL and usually ends with “Document: Done” being
> displayed by the
> browser. During this time, multiple TCP sessions (from SYN to FIN) are
> established and terminated (other traffic flows using UDP could
> occur as well).
> The distributed nature of Web page assembly is clear if you look
> at trace data.
> I hadn't looked, but the statement asserts there is a lot of HTTP state
> involved in this process as well. Is this really true? ...or is
> simply enough
> to move all the TCP activity and the browser will take care of
> things, maybe
> simply trigger a page reload and rendering will be take place
> correctly. Also,
> DNS activity is usually recursive and occurring in the background to help
> locate web page content and is capable of generating  network traffic
> too.         Regards  John
>
> Erik Nordmark wrote:
>
> > draft-reynolds-mobile-isp-requirements-00 talks about session mobility
> > without carefully defining a session.
> > It lists http as well as ftp as being sessions and goes on to require
> > session mobility from one device to another (from the phone to
> the laptop).
> >
> > What drives this requirement?
> > I think it is rather hard to build the necessary mechanisms (and get
> > interoperability) so that you can transfer not only the TCP connection
> > state (in order to get ftp session mobility) but also the application
> > state (the cookies, sessionids, SSL state and everything else
> that an http
> > browser maintains) so that you can move the http session from the
> > (small) browser in the phone to the (larger) browser in the laptop
> > and vice versa.
> >
> > So I'm quite concerned by this requirement as stated.
> >
> >   Erik
>