Transport and Services Area

Director(s):


   o David Borman:  dab@cray.com


Three working groups met at the San Diego IETF meeting.  They were the
Audio/Video Transport Working Group, the Domain Name System Working
Group, and the Services Location Protocol Working Group.  In addition, a
presentation was made on the new TCP options that have now been approved
by the IAB for publication as a Proposed Standard.

Audio/Video Transport Working Group (AVT)

The Audio/Video Transport Working Group meet three times.  One of the
more exciting activities that happened was the bi-directional
``audiocast'' of the IETF plenaries and the AVT sessions from Australia
to the United Kingdom.  Since the purpose of the Working Group is to
specify one or more protocols for doing audio/video experiments, they
dove right into defining data packet header formats for real-time
audio/video.  For quick deployment, a UDP base was chosen, rather than
running right over IP. Some of the fields considered in an additional
header are timestamps, sequence numbers, decryption checksum, version
number, encoding type, energy level and cumulative delay.  A set of
criteria was established to help decide which fields should be included,
and discussion will continue via email.  Addressing was another topic
that was discussed, covering IP multicast address and UDP port numbers,
and which parts can be dynamically allocated, and which parts need to be
administratively assigned.  Linkage between data and control was the
next topic; simple applications can be done without a control protocol,
but more complex applications will probably need some form of a control
protocol.  The Working Group may choose to specify a simple, interim
control protocol once the transport protocol is defined.  The last topic
was software encoding.  Although the Working Group is concerned with the
transport layer, it is felt that in the interest of interoperability it
would be useful to agree on some software compression techniques until
hardware becomes generally available.

Domain Name System Working Group (DNS)

The DNS Working Group discussed two main topics.  The first topic was
brought up by Mike St.  Johns, on the issue of getting a policy
statement on adding sub- domains to the EDU and COM domains, so that
names can be added in a consistent manner without overloading the top
level domain.  The rest of the meeting dealt with a proposed DNS MIB by
Jon Saperia, which was distributed prior to the meeting, and a counter
proposal by Rob Austin that was distributed at the meeting.  Most of the
discussion revolved around the differences between these two documents,
and in the end both authors were asked to work together to produce a
single proposal.


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Service Location Protocol Working Group (SVRLOC)

The Services Location Working Group discussed an architecture proposal,
which was presented by Scott Kaplan of FTP Software.  Some of the issues
outstanding are data representation and an RPC mechanism, both of which
it was felt could be borrowed from someplace else.  Multilingual support
is another issue that the Working Group wants to address, and John
Veizades will be persuing this topic for discussion at the next IETF
meeting.

For more information on each of these sessions, please refer to the
individual working group Minutes.



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