WG Creation: left out of the Package

[Allison Mankin <mankin@psg.com>]

I got this in this morninge, but it's not in the package.

------- Forwarded Message

To: iesg-secretary@ietf.org
Subject: Internal WG Review - New WG:  XCON - for Aug 7 Agenda
Reply-To: mankin@psg.com
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 08:24:57 -0700
From: Allison Mankin <mankin@psg.com>


Centralized Conferencing WG (xcon)


CHAIRS:	Alan Johnston (alan.johnston@mci.com)
        Adam Roach (adam@dynamicsoft.com)

Mailing list: <http://www.softarmor.com/mailman/listinfo/xcon>
List-Archive: <http://www.softarmor.com/pipermail/xcon>

Transport Area

Responsible Area Director:  Allison Mankin

Description of Working Group

The focus of this working group is to develop a standardized suite of 
protocols for tightly-coupled multimedia conferences, where strong security 
and authorization requirements are integral to the solution. 
Tightly-coupled conferences have a central point of control and 
authorization so they can enforce specific media and membership 
relationships, and provide an accurate roster of participants. The media 
mixing or combining function of a tightly-coupled conference need not be 
performed centrally, however.

The scope of this effort is intentionally more narrow than previous 
attempts to standardize conferencing (e.g. centralized control), and is 
intended to enable interoperability in a commercial environment which 
already has a number of non-standard implementations using some of the 
protocols.

Privacy, security, and authorization mechanisms are integral to the 
solution generated by the working group. This includes allowing 
participants to be completely invisible or to be visible but participate 
anonymously with respect to some or all of the other participants. 
Authorization rules allow for participants and non-participants to have 
roles (ex: speaker, moderator, owner), and to be otherwise authorized to 
perform membership and media manipulation for or on behalf of other 
participants. In order to preserve these properties, the protocols used 
will require implementation of channel security and authentication services.

Initially this combination of protocols will be specified with respect to 
session setup with SIP.  The solutions developed in XCON will not preclude 
operation with other signaling protocols; however it is anticipated that 
the use of other protocols would require modifications which are out of 
scope for this working group.

None of the protocols defined by this group will be SIP, although the SIP 
specific event notification framework will be used.  The group will use the 
high-level requirements and framework already described by documents 
published by the SIPPING WG.

The deliverables for the group will be:
- - A mechanism for membership and authorization control
- - A mechanism to manipulate and describe media "mixing" or "topology" for 
multiple media types (audio, video, text)
- - A mechanism for notification of conference related events/changes (for 
example a floor change)
- - A basic floor control protocol

The initial set of protocols will be developed for use in unicast media 
conferences. The working group will perform a second round of work to 
enhance the set of protocols as necessary for use with multicast media 
after their initial publication.

The following items are specifically out-of-scope:
- - Voting
- - Fully distributed conferences
- - Loosely-coupled conferences (no central point of control)
- - Far-end device control
- - Protocol used between the conference controller and the mixer(s)
- - Capabilities negotiation of the mixer(s)
- - Master-slave cascaded conferences

The working group will coordinate closely with the SIPPING and MMUSIC 
working groups. In addition the working group will cooperate with other 
groups as needed, including SIP, AVT, and the W3C SMIL working groups.
In addition, the working group will consider a number of existing drafts (a 
non-exhaustive list is included below) as input to the working group.

Proposed Milestones

Oct 2003 Submit Requirements for Membership Manipulation for publication as 
Informational
Oct 2003 Submit Requirements for Basic Floor Control for publication as 
Informational
Nov 2003 Submit Conferencing Scenarios document for publication as 
Informational
Nov 2003 Submit Use Cases for Media Topology Control for publication as 
Informational
Dec 2003 Submit Requirements for Media Topology Control for publication as 
Informational
Feb 2004 Submit Basic Floor Control Protocol for publication as PS
Mar 2004 Submit Notification Event package extension for conference related 
events for publication as PS
May 2004 Submit Membership Manipulation Protocol for publication as PS
Jul 2004 Submit Protocol for Media Topology Control for publication as PS






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