RE: WG Review: Centralized Conferencing (xcon)

["Peterson, Jon" <jon.peterson@neustar.biz>]

I think Transport is the right area because of XCON's strong relationship to
SIP, SIPPING, MMUSIC and AVT; while it may be an historical accident that
those groups are in Transport, it wouldn't benefit the situation to locate
XCON elsewhere - it would just give rise to more need for cross-area review.
While early input from Security and Applications would undoubtedly be
valuable, XCON will be a customer of the work of those areas, not a group
that's designing competing protocols - certainly, XCON has neither the
expertise nor the inclination to design security mechanisms comparable to
the work in, say, MSEC. Transport is also the area where the necessary SIP
expertise is the most concentrated; the day may come when SIP expertise is
as common outside the Transport Area as IP expertise is outside the Internet
Area, but I'm not holding my breath.

Your point about late surprises is a good one, though, and we plan to make
sure that we have considerable input from Apps and Sec where relevant very
early in the process.

- J

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John C Klensin [mailto:klensin@jck.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 4:51 AM
> To: iesg@ietf.org
> Subject: Re: WG Review: Centralized Conferencing (xcon)
> 
> 
> Out of curiosity, why is this proposed to be in Transport?  I 
> know SIP is there, but we don't assign things to the Internet 
> area because they use IP.  From the description, the critical 
> issues this WG will face would seem to more naturally fit in 
> Applications or Security.  In Transport, it will require a good 
> deal of cross-area and cross-WG coordination; the requirement 
> for that type of coordination has often, IMO, been a source of 
> late surprises.
> 
>      john
> 
> 
> --On Monday, 11 August, 2003 15:34 -0400 The IESG 
> <iesg-secretary@ietf.org> wrote:
> 
> >
> > A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Transport
> > Area. The IESG has not made any determination as yet.
> > The following description was submitted, and is provided
> > for informational purposes only:
> >
> > Centralized Conferencing (xcon)
> > ---------------------------------------------------
> > Current Status: Proposed Working Group
> >
> > 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 as input to the
> > working group.
> >
> >
> 
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