Subject: [P2Prg] proposed activity - P2P content, resource, service discovery

From: "John Buford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 13:22:15 -0400

Dear P2PRG participants:

Outside of IRTF there has been much activity in protocols for discovery of
content,
resources, and services.  More recently we see more proposals for combining
peer-to-peer mechanisms like DHT to address scalability issues in existing
discovery protocols.  Generally, some proposals address using p2p to evolve
existing IETF services like DNS or SLP, and others address a general
platform for discovery of any content, resource, or service.  We believe
that
there remain open issues in this important area of p2p.  The target is
a wide-area p2p discovery protocol which combines scalability, security,
trust, interoperability, and generality.

Along these lines we have prepared a proposed P2PRG subgroup activity on
"P2P Content, Resource, and Service Discovery", and appreciate
Bobby's and other participant's feedback on an earlier draft.
The description of the proposed subgroup activity follows.

We look forward to discussing this activity further, on the email list
and at the Paris meeting.

Regards,
John Buford
==================================================================
P2P Content, Resource and Service
Discovery (CORE) Subgroup

P2PRG-IRTF Activity

1. Motivation and Scope

Discovery of content, resources and services is a fundamental operation for
peers in a peer-to-peer network. Many discovery mechanisms have been
proposed.
However existing designs have limitations in one or more areas of
scalability,
security, interoperability, or generality. The purpose of this subgroup
activity
is to define a research agenda within the P2PRG community to evaluate
existing
research, identify requirements, and develop solutions for wide-area
peer-to-peer content, resource, and service discovery.

We expect to address this goal in two dimensions:

- An evolution of existing Internet server-based infrastructure such as DNS
and
SLP. Examples of recent research results that are starting points include
DDNS
and OSDA.

- A general-purpose Internet mechanism on which various wide-area P2P
applications
can be constructed. Examples of research systems include INS/Twine and
OpenDHT.

We expect scalability, security, trust, interoperability, performance, and
generality to be important requirements in the overall architecture.

2. Existing Discovery Methods

Existing methods include client-server mechansisms (such as SLP), mechanisms
integrated into device network adapters (such as Bluetooth SDP), mechanisms
integrated in middleware platforms (such as Web services, Jini, and JXTA),
and
home network oriented solutions (UPnP SSDP).

In addition there are experimental systems for service discovery such as
SSDS
and these extensions to SLP: WASRV, wide-area SLP, and mesh-enhanced SLP;
and
the use of wide-area multicast to advertise and discover services.
Further there are various peer-to-peer systems and proposed designs, both
unstructured and structured by which large numbers of peers share content
and
services. Typically large-scale unstructured peer-to-peer systems use
limited
scope flooding to reach other peers with requests, whereas structured
peer-to-peer systems use a distributed hash table (DHT) to store key-value
peers.

Associated with such discovery mechanisms are related mechanisms for
service/resource description, advertisement, notification, and service
invocation.

3. Milestones

- Problem statement. There may be separate problem statements for the
Internet
infrastructure case vs the application infrastructure

- Survey of related work. Several surveys exist, but do not specifically
address
the two goals above.

- Experimental plan. We envision development of a large scale testbed for
experimenting with wide-area service discovery. We believe a collaborative
testbed is a unique benefit of working in the IRTF versus other research
contexts. The experimental plan will address the resources, requirements,
and
participants needed to launch this.

- Experimental results. Dependent on level of participation of the P2PRG
community, summary of experiments related to comparing designs and
evaulating
them with respect to functionality, scalability, performance, and
scalability.

4. Liaisons

Put in place relationships with relevant IETF WGs in application area and
internet area (e.g., DNSEXT) as the experimental work progresses.

5. Initial Participants

J. Buford
E. Shim
A. Kaplan
M. Rahman
B. Kumar
K. Ross
P. Frankl
M. Kolberg
V. Safonov
S. Narayanan

An html version of the proposal can be seen at
     www.cs.uml.edu/~buford/irtf-p2prg/core.html
and there is a link there to a PDF version.

_______________________________________________
P2prg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/p2prg

---

From: Bill Yeager <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:45:48 -0700

Hello John,

This is an excellent proposal.

Before we proceed further can you please give me the affiliations of 
the initial participants?

How much we will discuss this topic at Paris is not clear and depends 
on the amount of time allocated to our meeting. I cannot imagine more 
than a few bullets on the proposal in any case, and I see no problem 
with including this effort in the P2P RG.

Others may wish to modify its scope, goals, etc, and that also might be 
appropriate for discussion at Paris if time permits, and is certainly 
appropriate for the mailing list.

Thanks,

Bill Yeager

---

From: "John Buford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:29:12 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Yeager [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 1:46 PM
To: John Buford
Cc: [email-masked]; Bobby Bhattacharjee
Subject: Re: [P2Prg] proposed activity - P2P content, resource, service
discovery

Hello John,

[Hello Bill ... thanks]

[see below.  we are looking for additional participants]

[great.  the IETF schedule has 1.5 hour allotted to the RG on Monday 8/1]

Thanks,

Bill Yeager

On Jul 25, 2005, at 10:22 AM, John Buford wrote:

> 5. Initial Participants
>
> J. Buford PDNL (Panasonic Digital Networking Lab)
> E. Shim  PDNL
> A. Kaplan PDNL
> M. Rahman PDNL
> B. Kumar PDNL
> K. Ross  Polytechnic U.
> P. Frankl Polytechnic U.
> M. Kolberg U. Stirling
> V. Safonov  St Petersburg State Univ
> S. Narayanan  PDNL

---

From: Bill Yeager <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:34:05 -0700

Hello John,

This is being changed to a different day. That's why I've not announced 
the meeting to the general mailing list with an agenda.

Thanks for the affiliation list. Hopefully, this will grow to include 
other companies' research labs too. That's very important.

Bill

---

From: "John Buford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:46:51 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Yeager [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 2:34 PM
To: John Buford
Cc: [email-masked]; Bobby Samrat Bhattacharjee
Subject: Re: [P2Prg] proposed activity - P2P content, resource,service
discovery

Hello John,

[ yes, good point.  it may be of interest to the P2PRG that we
are also partipating in another related activity - standardization
of an API for service discovery in the Java community (JCP 259).
Led by Siemens, with Nokia, Motorola, Sun, Cingular, Hutchinson,
and Panasonic.

so we are quite interested in building up broad participation in
the subgroup, and look to leverage your and Bobby's leadership 
of the P2PRG to do this.  we can discuss more F2F in Paris 
hopefully.  

John ]

Bill