Speaking of Standards

Given the services we provide, one of the IETF working groups that we (Voxeo) are most interested in is the Media Server Control (mediactrl) Working Group (more information here). The charter provides a sense of what it is about:

Real-time multi-media applications often need the services of media processing elements. It is true that modern endpoints are capable of media processing. However, the physics of some media processing applications dictate that it is much more efficient for the media processing to occur at a centralized location. By media processing, we mean media mixing, recording and playing media, and interacting with a user in the audio or video domains. The commercial market calls these media processing network elements “media servers.”

Some services achieve significant efficiencies when a central node performs media processing. Because of these efficiencies, media servers are widely used for conference mixing, multimedia messaging, content rendering, and speech, voice, key press, and other audio and video input and output user interface modalities. Given the wide acceptance of the media server, we need a standard way to control them.

Basically, the intent of the group is to arrive at a protocol suite of “media server control protocols” that standardize communication between “application servers” and “media servers”. One of the initial documents under discussion is the “requirements” document that lists the “requirements” that any proposal for a “media server control protocol” must meet. As stated in the charter, the objective of the document is:

1. A requirements document. This document will identify and enumerate requirements for a suite of media server control protocols. Given that one of the common media server clients is a conference application server, we will consider the application server - media server requirements developed by the XCON work group. Likewise, we will consider media server control requirements from other standards groups, such as 3GPP SA2 and CT1.

In any event, revision 3 of the requirements is out now, draft-ietf-mediactrl-requirements-03.txt, and reflects the input provided both at IETF 70 and in subsequent discussion on the mailing list. I’m personally pleased to see the inclusion of some of the security aspects that I (and others) had suggested ought to be included:

REQ-MCP-11 - The MS control protocol shall include an authentication component to ensure that only an authorized AS can communicate with the MS and vice versa.

REQ-MCP-12 - The MS control protocol shall use some form of transport protection to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data between the AS and MS.

REQ-MCP-13 - The MS control protocol requires mechanisms to protect the MS resources used by one AS from another AS since the solution need to support multiple AS controlling one MS.

Anyway, if you have any opinions about the requirements in the document, now is the time to voice them as the document is going into the final stages of approval. We need to nail the requirements as tightly as possible at the front end of the process so that later documents can reflect these requirements. (If you want to submit comments, the authors email addresses are found at the end of the document itself.)

Technorati Tags: ietf, sip, mediactrl

Tags: IETF, MediaCTRL, SIP

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