Speaking of Standards

One of the more interesting (to me) working groups within the IETF right now is the “P2PSIP” working group which is aiming to develop ways to let SIP clients communicate on a “peer-to-peer” basis, i.e. without any servers. As stated in the working group’s charter:

The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Session Initiation Protocol working group (P2PSIP WG) is chartered to develop protocols and mechanisms for the use of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in settings where the service of establishing and managing sessions is principally handled by a collection of intelligent endpoints, rather than centralized servers as in SIP as currently deployed. A number of cases where such an architecture is desirable have been documented.

Peer-to-peer is intriguing to me primarily because it does represent a different deployment paradigm than what we are primarily using today for SIP deployments. Today SIP clients register with SIP servers and all the signaling is generally handled by those servers. With P2PSIP, the idea would be that you remove the servers and have all the routing, signaling, etc. handled by the “cloud” of P2P SIP clients. Clients get added and removed to the P2P cloud as they come and go and all the “intelligence” resides in the cloud.

Outside of the world of open standards, this architecture is best seen in voice with Skype. Skype clients connect to each other and route calls and media packets across the Skype cloud. I should note that Skype is not a pure P2P cloud. As was shown by the 2-day outage earlier this year, Skype still does very much rely on servers for authentication.

Will the P2PSIP working group wind up creating something like an open standards version of Skype? Maybe… maybe not… the effort is really only in the beginning stages. (And you can stay up with what is going on at “p2psip.org“.) There are all sorts of security and privacy issues that have to be addressed but it’s intriguing to see. It’s certainly a group I’ll be monitoring and participating in to the extent that I can.

P.S. If you are curious to experiment with open P2P architectures, you can check out OpenDHT.org, an open, publicly accessbile distributed hash table (DHT). Do be warned, though, that this is really for developers…

Technorati Tags: ietf, sip, skype, p2p, p2psip

Tags: IETF, P2P, P2PSIP, SIP, Skype

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