Speaking of Standards

The Squawk Box interview I mentioned yesterday about P2P SIP is now available for download. It was an enjoyable interview with David Bryan and I think you’ll learn a lot about P2P SIP from it. We talked about what P2PSIP is, why you might use it, where it might be applicable, what the security ramifications might be and how you might use P2PSIP. It’s quite a fascinating area of research and development and we’ll be curious to see how it all evolves.

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squawk box, sip, p2psip, p2p, dan york, ietf

UPDATE: The podcast referenced here is now available for listening.

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Given that I’ve written here before about Peer-to-Peer (P2P) SIP (and why it’s of interest to us), I thought I’d invite you to join in tomorrow (July 9, 2008) at 11am US Eastern time when I’ll be interviewing David Bryan, co-chair of the IETF’s P2PSIP Working Group and CEO of SIPpeerior Technologies, about P2P SIP… what it is, who might use it, and why it matters.  It should be an enjoyable and interesting call for those of us who are interested in the underlying networks that make VoIP possible.  

If you would like to join into the call and are a Facebook user, you can easily join the call through the Calliflower application for Facebook.  If you don’t use Facebook,  you can just go to the Calliflower.com website (you will need to create a free account there).  If you can’t join us at 11am US Eastern time tomorrow (Wednesday, July 9th), you will also be able to listen to the show later in the day when I post it to Alec Saunders blog at Saunderslog.com.

Here’s a brief video preview:

P.S. “Squawk Box” is a daily podcast on technical topics of the day hosted and produced by Alec Saunders and appearing on his Saunderslog blog. I often participate in the calls and as Alec is on vacation this month, he asked me to fill in as a host for him this week. Other than my involvement as a participant, there is no formal connection at all between Voxeo and the Squawk Box podcast.

As a followup to earlier posts, I thought I should mention that notes from the IETF’s P2P Infrastructure Workshop on May 28th are now available for download:

• Spencer Dawkins’ notes and Jason Livingood’s correction
  
• Alissa Cooper’s more detailed notes

• Updated slides, including those presented at the session. Comcast also made their slides available separately.

There is much discussion continuing on the “p2pi” mailing list (see the discussion archive) which is open to anyone interested to join. Plans are underway for BOF sessions at the upcoming IETF 72 meeting in Dublin. If you’re interested, definitely do join the list!

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ietf, p2p, comcast, bittorrent, internet, networking, peertopeer, standards

“Why do you write so much about P2P SIP? Who’s really going to use it? Why do you care? Isn’t it really just a lame attempt to create an open standards version of Skype?”

As you might imagine, I’ve heard those questions more than a few times. And yet still I keep writing about it. Why? Part of the answer lies in my post back in December… today the world of SIP is all really “client/server” but the future might be quite different. Today you have SIP user agents that register and connect to SIP servers (which might be SIP proxies, SIP registrars or other types of servers). In fact, our own Prophecy product is a powerful SIP application server. Our Evolution developer portal is a massive SIP-application-server-in-the-cloud (more here) that connects to and from SIP clients.

But now imagine a SIP deployment without servers.

Imagine that you could simply distribute a series of SIP phones and have them all rapidly interconnect to each other and start communicating. Think of how fast you could potentially deploy a small office. In this time of US presidential campaigns, I think of the “advance teams” that are dropped into some office space in some city to organize an area. Imagine if they could be given a bunch of phones which just self-organized into a working communication environment? Plug the phones into a network switch and have them sort out extensions, PSTN gateways, all of that. There are all sorts of similar situations. Teams of consultants or auditors. Emergency environments. Short-term branch offices. Outside of the rapid deployment, there are just general uses in small businesses that don’t want to pay for servers. You could even see it being used in a home environment. Today this kind of thing can be done with “teleworker” phones hooked back to a central IP-PBX or hosted service (I know because I helped launch one back in 2003), but what if it could be even easier?

This is the promise of P2P SIP. Take a bunch of SIP endpoints and they form their own P2P “cloud” (or “overlay network” in P2P lingo). They discover resources like PSTN gateways or application servers. If a phone dies, the P2P cloud routes around it and continues. Communication happens.

Now the reality is not quite there today. There is a great amount of work being done within the IETF on this subject through the P2PSIP Working Group. There are P2PSIP implementations (mostly open source and a few commercial). There is a great amount of academic research going on (one example here). It is all still early days, though.

And on one level, that is what is so exciting. We are re-imagining what a network could be. We are pushing the power and intelligence truly out to the very edge of the network.

We are creating clouds.

Local clouds. Self-organizing clouds. Network “clouds” that connect to other clouds. It’s a different mindset… a different paradigm… thinking of networks not in terms of servers with their clients but in terms of nodes able to communicate with other nodes.

Will it work on a large scale? We’ll see… there’s a whole whack of security issues… privacy issues… scalability issues… but people are looking at those issues. Skype has certainly shown that a P2P telephony environment can be created and can be quite successful. (Although it should be noted that purists might not consider Skype a pure P2P network because they do have enrollment servers that deal with authentication, etc.) Other P2P networks for file sharing have shown the potential is there to build massively scalable networks. The building blocks are all around us.

So what’s the Voxeo angle, eh? Why do I care about it?

Two answers, really. First, there is the basic reality that just because you are creating a new way of connecting a telephony system it doesn’t remove the need for voice application services. You still want to run voice applications. You still need IVR systems. You still need ways to mashup voice with web services. You still need to connect to the PSTN. Some of those services may be able to live within the actual P2P cloud. Some of them will need to be in external servers or services. Obviously that’s what we do and so my interest is in how our software and services might play in this evolving space.

Second, it’s all about clouds. While there is a huge buzz these days about “cloud computing” and “virtualization“, this is what we’ve been doing here at Voxeo since our founding back in 1999! You can go right now to our Evolution developer portal, create your free account and start building voice applications that run in our massively distributed computing cloud. Behind the scenes, there’s a massively-scalable, geographically-distributed, open-standards-based, redundant (and, incidentally, patented) network architecture that virtualizes your voice and IVR applications. You have no idea what server your voice apps are running on and you don’t care. Need more ports… need more CPU cycles… the cloud adjusts for all of that. It’s all transparent to you.

Our “cloud” is then connected out into other “clouds”. You can connect to our cloud from the PSTN, SIP or Skype and then go back out to the PSTN or SIP clouds. We’re part of the massive interconnect currently being built online.

So as there is the potential to create local P2P “clouds”, my interest on multiple levels is pretty basic - how do we connect those small local clouds to our larger cloud and from there to the rest of the interconnected voice and data networks? I want to look at how our services can enable the proliferation of P2P SIP clouds.

Sure, large numbers of “production” deployments of P2P SIP are probably 3-5 years out… maybe even longer (but maybe not). At the current time there’s not a whole lot I can really do except engage in the ongoing conversations about P2P SIP and try to see what where it’s going. But that’s what I and my colleagues in our Office of the CTO do. We’re the guys up in the crow’s nest looking out and scanning the horizon for what’s coming next. Companies that expect to be around have to keep doing that. So that’s what I do. And that’s why I write about P2P SIP and why I’ll keep writing about it.

It’s all about the clouds… and how we connect them all together…

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p2p, p2psip, sip, ietf, clouds, cloudcomputing, virtualization, ivr virtualization, peer to peer, skype, voxeo, voip, voice

As I wrote about previously, the IETF is hosting a “P2P Infrastructure Workshop” next week on May 28th on the MIT campus near Boston. There have been some updates in the past week:

• The workshop agenda has been published.

• The list of submitted papers is now available.

• Copies of the submitted papers are available for download as individual files or as a ZIP file containing all papers. (Note that this link does not work with all browsers. On my Mac it worked in Safari but not in Firefox 3.)

Reading through the agenda, it sounds like it will be a great session. P2P is really the next great area of network development, in my opinion, and making sure that the environment is such that we can do it well is key to seeing innovation and growth in that space. Anything like this workshop that can help set the stage for P2P developments is definitely to be encouraged.

P.S. I had hoped to attend myself, but given that I’ve got a moving truck showing up about 36 hours after this workshop ends (I’m moving from VT to NH) I somehow don’t see me getting down there.

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ietf, p2p, networking, internet, workshops

It’s hard these days to escape news about peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and the concerns raised by service providers about those P2P apps. With recent FCC hearings about Comcast “delaying” P2P traffic, the topic is getting a great amount of discussion across the blogosphere and in the media in general. To look at the issue from a technical point-of-view and see if there are technical solutions that could help in the area, the IETF recently announced a “workshop on P2P Infrastructure” to be held on May 28th on the campus of MIT in the Boston area.

From a voice perspective, any kind of latency / delay is something to be avoided at all costs. As researchers look at P2P SIP as a future deployment model, getting the infrastructure right is a key factor in the future success of P2P SIP. Now, serious deployments of P2P SIP won’t happen for some time now (probably a few years), but the reality is that it will also take some time for any technical solutions to: 1) work their way through IETF; 2) be incorporated into vendor equipment; and 3) actually be deployed in service provider networks. So now is really a good time to get started.

If you are interested in P2P applications in general and are in the Boston area (or can get there), please do consider attending this workshop. There is a wiki page for the workshop that will be updated as the workshop gets closer and a ‘p2pi’ mailing list that is open to anyone to join.

Here is part of the announcement that explains what the workshop will be about:

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The Real-time Applications & Infrastructure (RAI) Area Directors, Jon
Peterson and Cullen Jennings, would like to announce an IETF workshop on
P2P Infrastructure to be held on May 28, 2008 at 50 Vassar St, Room
34-101 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA USA.

Several large ISPs have encountered issues with P2P traffic. The
transfer of static, delay-tolerant data between nodes on the Internet is
a well-understood problem, but traditional management of fairness at the
transport level has largely been circumvented by applications designed
to achieve the best end-user transfer rates. This results, at peak
times, in networks running near absolute capacity, and in which all
traffic incurs delays; the applications that bear the brunt of this
additional latency are real-time applications like VoIP and Internet
gaming. This has led to need for further discussion of the proper
approaches to P2P application development, and infrastructure management
in environments where P2P is commonly used. This workshop intends to
discover where additional IETF standards work is needed, or existing
work might be reapplied, to alleviate these difficulties. In particular,
the workshop will draw on the experiences of Comcast and BitTorrent,
representatives of both of whom will present their perspectives on the
problem space.

Example solution discussions might include, but are not limited to:
deployment of application servers or caches to reduce network load; new
rendez-vous mechanisms to optimize P2P network topology; enabling
applications to signal their bandwidth needs (and priority or lack
thereof) to networks; enabling networks to signal bandwidth constraints
to elastic and inelastic applications; and, new approaches to fairness
that are coupled with incentives for applications. Contributions from
subject matter experts in the problem and solution space are
welcome. The primary outcome should be a direction for one or more IETF
efforts exploring the best practices for addressing these challenges.

The organizers would like to stress that this is a technical workshop
exploring engineering issues and practices. The public policy
implications of P2P applications are not in the scope of this workshop.

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If you would like more information about how to participate in the workshop, please read the full announcement.

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ietf, standards, p2p, peer-to-peer, p2psip, sip, voip, comcast, bittorrent, Internet, networking

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…

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ietf, sip, skype, p2p, p2psip