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Re: [Sip] B2BUA & Max-Forwards



--On Wednesday, December 04, 2002 4:50 PM +0000 Padma Suresh <padma_suresh@hotmail.com> wrote:



A B2BUA is an intermediate network element
no it isn't. It's one or more UA's in the same box communicating with each other using some private machinery, such as an API+application code.

Calling a B2BUA an intermediate network element is probably where most of the nonsense on this thread originates. Perhaps that's the basic clarification we need in the description to avoid these incorrect expectations?

and MUST maintain the
expectations of the endpoints involved in the session.

Also incorrect. Since the B2BUA is at least 2 UA's its job is to SEPARATELY maintain the expectations of EACH endpoint it is talking to. This does not infer ANY transitivity properties across a B2BUA at all; in fact, if you wanted well-defined transitivity you would have put in a proxy instead.

Not forwarding the Require or Expires headers (and some more) would break
the above which would not be quite acceptable.

Disagree vociferiously. As others have pointed out, it is crucial to NOT forward any headers. You MUST consume them and process them on receipt. You must GENERATE and send them on transmit. What happens in between is whatever algorithm or algorithms the application doing the B2BUA functions deems appropriate. If there is any relationship at all between the input and the output, that relationship is established by the the application logic. If the application logic performs the identity mapping, then that is what the application thinks is the appropriate thing to do. If the application logic (for example) decrements Max-Forwards by 42 because Douglas Adam's probate attorney wrote it, that's ok too (as long as the result is >0 of course...).

However, yes, the B2BUA can choose to step out of the signalling path by
setting the contact header to the appropriate endpoint.

It is not *in* the signaling path.

Vijay I agree that the ambiguity of choosing which header to pass on and
which not, could be well avoided.

Regards

Padma

If this level of misunderstanding of SIP persists by having the spec talk about B2BUAs, then perhaps the best this to do is the radical step of simply removing all references to them and banning the term from the lexicon.

Dave.


From: "Vijay K. Gurbani"
To: Padma Suresh
CC: pete@tech-know-ware.com, sip@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Sip] B2BUA & Max-Forwards
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:21:11 -0600

Padma Suresh wrote:
Vijay,

You are right -

A B2BUA needs to propagate some of the headers received in a
request/response to the other endpoint.
Choosing which headers should be passed by a B2BUA and which not is
exactly the ambiguity that we should AVOID, as I pointed out in my
my response to the original poster. As others have expressed, we
may
try to taxonomize different types of B2BUAs, but each will have a
different manner of handling the headers (depending on the
application
being realized by that particular B2BUA).

An anonymizer B2BUA may change To, From, Contact, etc, for instance
(and
maintain internal state). A network-hiding B2BUA may scrap all Via
headers coming in and only expose one Via header going out. The
possibilities are endless.

Example: Require, Expires to name a few. This is because these
headers actually are relevant end to end.
A B2BUA may decide to consume the Require and change the Expires
header
(maybe decrease its value) before sending it downstream, thus
causing
havoc with the expectations of the sending UAC.

However, some of the other headers like Contact should be set
by the B2BUA as itself.
Likewise, I can imagine a B2BUA which rendezvous two users and steps
out of subsequent signaling. Thus the Contact it sends to each of
the users is that of the other peer.

I would strongly *stay away* from prescribing which headers must be
passed by a B2BUA and which must not.

Regards,

- vijay
--
Vijay K. Gurbani vkg@{lucent.com,research.bell-labs.com,acm.org}
Wireless Networks Group/Internet Software and Services
Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs Innovations, 2000 Lucent Lane, Rm
6G-440
Naperville, Illinois 60566 Voice: +1 630 224 0216

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