Re: What is a "session"?

[James Kempf <James.Kempf@Sun.COM>]

Erik,

I think there is a fairly clear notion of what a session is for
multimedia data in which SIP is used to make the initial connection
(after all, SIP is the Session Initiation Protocol). SIP defines
the INVITE to start a session and BYE to terminate it. The state
involved in maintaining the session is identified in the SDP message
within the INVITE 

Trying to map this model onto naturally "sessionless" protocols
such as HTTP seems fraught with peril. So perhaps the requirement
could be restricted somewhat to those types of services that
have a natural session definition.

		jak


>Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 10:14:52 +0200 (CEST)
>From: Erik Nordmark <Erik.Nordmark@eng.sun.com>
>Subject: What is a "session"?
>To: more@ops.ietf.org
>
>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
>
>