XCON BOF report

[Mark Handley <M.Handley@cs.ucl.ac.uk>]

XCON BOF report

It's 10 years this IETF since MMUSIC was chartered to do pretty much
exactly what xcon is trying to do.  The scope is basically simple
small-scale multimedia conferencing, including media setup/teardown,
dialin and dialout, floor control, membership control, and a few
associated functions.  There's clearly a large demand for this.  There
was near unanimity in the room for progressing.

The only real debate (rathole) was whether multicast is in scope or
not.  My own view is that it should be in scope, but not the focus of
the group.  In particular, if multicast is used, only a subset of the
security and media control functionality should be available.
Multicast control messages should be out of scope.  If the group tries
to solve all the issues with multicast media they'll rathole for ever,
but if they ruled it completely out of scope that would be unfortunate
- needs careful chairing on this issue.

A side issue: the chairs claim that xcon is independent of the
signalling protocol (SIP, H.323) used to setup or modify sessions.  My
preference would be for them to simple choose SIP - this is likely to
result in less complexity, because otherwise they'll be trying to
describe sessions in a signalling-independent manner, which is
probably a waste of effort.

Summary: should be a WG.