[Int-area] Application referrals - GROBJ

["Dan Wing" <dwing at cisco.com>]

(Please send replies to grobj at ietf.org)

Today's applications usually exchange an IP address and a TCP (or UDP)
port for referrals.  While this works in a wide variety of situations,
it has been shown insufficient with more complex networks that consist
of different address realms (due to IPv4 NATs and IPv6 ULAs),
different address families (IPv4 and IPv6) and new transport protocols
(such as SCTP).  Some applications have pursued their own mechanisms
to extend their referral mechanism (e.g., draft-ietf-mmusic-ice).

It is important to provide guidance to applications and network
devices so that referrals can work between two applications.  Such
guidance is important today, and will be more important as networks
become more complex with common deployments of host and network
multi-homing, tunnels, VPNs, and address family translators.

The mailing list GROBJ has been created to discuss Generic Referral 
Objects (GRO) for application referrals.  Interested parties can 
join the mailing list at https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/grobj

Draft:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-behave-referral-object

BoF proposal: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/GROBJ-BOF.txt

-d