Subject: WG Review: Next Steps in Signaling (nsis)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 11:35:49 -0400

A modified charter has been submitted for Next Steps in Signaling (nsis) 
in the Transport Area of the IETF. The IESG has not made any determination yet.

The following description was submitted, and is provided for 
informational purposes only.

 Next Steps in Signaling (nsis) 
 -------------------------------

 Current Status: Active Working Group

 Description of Working Group:

 The Next Steps in Signaling Working Group is responsible for
 standardizing an IP signaling protocol with QoS signaling as the first
 use case. This working group will concentrate on a two-layer
 signaling paradigm. The intention is to re-use, where appropriate,
 the protocol mechanisms of RSVP, while at the same time simplifying it
 and applying a more general signaling model.

 The existing work on the requirements, the framework and analysis of
 existing protocols will be completed and used as input for the
 protocol work.

 NSIS will develop a transport layer signaling protocol for the
 transport of upper layer signaling. In order to support a toolbox or
 building block approach, the two-layer model will be used to separate
 the transport of the signaling from the application signaling. This
 allows for a more general signaling protocol to be developed to
 support signaling for different services or resources, such as NAT &
 firewall traversal and QoS resources. The initial NSIS application
 will be an optimized RSVP QoS signaling protocol. The second
 application will be a middle box traversal protocol. It may be that a
 rechartering of the working group occurs before the completion of this
 milestone.

 Security is a very important concern for NSIS. The working group will
 study and analyze the threats and security requirements for
 signaling. Compatibility with authentication and authorization
 mechanisms such as those of Diameter, COPS for RSVP (RFC 2749) and
 RSVP Session Authorization (RFC 3250), will be addressed.

 It is a non-goal of the working group to develop new resource
 allocation protocols. Resource reservation and traffic engineering are
 out of scope of this working group. Additionally, third party
 signaling is out of scope of this working group. Mobility protocols
 and AAA work are out of scope of the working group. The work produced
 in this Working Group should work with existing IETF mobility and AAA
 protocols, including (but not limited to) Mobile IP, SeaMoby Context
 Transfer, etc. NSIS also welcomes participation and expression of
 requirements from non-IETF standards organization members, for
 instance 3GPP, 3GPP2 and ITU-T.