Subject: 56th IETF Meeting - Path-Decoupled Signaling BOF (pads)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2003 12:12:34 -0500

Path-Decoupled Signaling BOF (pads)

Thursday, March 20 at 1530-1730
===============================

CHAIRS: S. Van den Bosch <[email-masked]>
        M. Brunner <[email-masked]>

Introduction:

The Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS) WG is developing a next-generation
general purpose signaling protocol. The protocol is intended to be
useful for a wide variety of applications including reservation of QoS
resources and configuration of middleboxes (NATs, firewalls). The
current consensus within NSIS is that the protocol would consist of
two layers: a generic (NSIS) transport or messaging layer for
delivering packets between NSIS capable nodes and one or more specific
(NSIS) signaling layer which would implement the various
applications. A common characteristic of all applications is that they
require the installation or modification of state or the collection of
information along the data path. NSIS is currently focusing on an
interpretation of 'along the data path' as 'visiting the same routers
as the data flow'. This is denoted as path-coupled signaling. For a
number of applications, it would be useful to have a somewhat broader
interpretation of 'along the data path', e.g. 'visiting the same AS's
as the data flow'. This is denoted as path-decoupled signaling.

The purpose of the BOF session is to survey and discuss the
path-decoupled signaling case. The first part of the discussion should
bring forward arguments and counter-arguments for path-decoupled
signaling.  - What are potential interesting use cases for
path-decoupled signaling - ...  The second part deals with the
expected impact path-decoupled signaling would have on the NSIS
protocol. It should provide insight in the expected consequences on
the layer split and the modularity of both layers in case they would
need to support path-decoupled signaling applications.

Proposed agenda:

1. Introduction - 5 minutes
2. Why path-decoupled signaling? - 20 minutes
3. Impact on NSIS? - 10 minutes
4. Discussion and round-up - 25 minutes