Speaking of Standards

Out at IETF 70, the SIP Forum will also be holding their first “SIP Interoperability Workshop” on Monday, December 3rd, from 11:30am - 1:00pm at the Westin hotel in Vancouver where the IETF meetings will be held. From the SIP Forum website:

Co-located with the 70th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada, at the Westin Bayshore Resort & Marina, Monday, December 3, 2007, from 11:30am-1:00pm in Salon B, the SIP Forum’s SIP Interoperability Workshop will serve as a forum to bring together researchers, engineers, and service providers to exchange ideas, share experiences, and propose approaches to address interoperability problems.

The SIP Forum is actively seeking participation from attendees of IETF 70, and has made an official call for papers.

The Call for Papers (which closed on November 27th) and other information about the event can be found in this PDF document. Here is the relevant section about the aim of the workshop:

SIP has been gaining traction as a preferred network signaling protocol for real-time communications networks. There has been a considerable amount of low-level protocol testing and interoperability, such as provided by the SIP Interoperability Test event, or SIPit, which is in its seventh year. There are many independent implementations of
clients, servers, proxies, back-to-back User Agents, registrars, and the like. In addition, there are significant network deployments, many at scale.

While this is all good, deployment experience is showing that interoperability is difficult to achieve. Products from a single vendor tend to work well with each other. However, multi-vendor interoperability, especially above the basic stack level, has historically been difficult to achieve. In fact, the proof point of the success of vendors attending SIPit indicates interoperability problems may not be due to the specification itself.

This workshop serves as a forum to bring together researchers, engineers, and service providers to exchange ideas, share experiences, and propose approaches to address interoperability problems. Particular focus will be on systemic or architectural problems, as opposed to simple implementation errors.

If the workshop identifies concrete proposals to improve interoperability that would require modifications to the underlying protocols, these proposals will be forwarded to the appropriate groups in the IETF.

I’ll be there on Monday… if any of you are as well, I will look forward to seeing you there.

Technorati Tags:
ietf, sip, sip forum, interoperability

Tags: IETF, interoperability, SIP, SIP Forum

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