Subject: [P2PSIP] New draft on Bootstrap Mechanisms

From: Philip Matthews <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 12:16:25 -0500

Eric Cooper, Alan Johnston, and I have written a draft that
describes how to a peer that wishes to join a P2PSIP overlay
can locate a peer in the overlay ("the bootstrap peer") and
then set up the first initial connection to the overlay.

The current version of the draft describes two mechanisms.
One mechanism uses multicast to locate a bootstrap peer,
while the other uses a bootstrap server to locate a bootstrap peer.

These two mechanisms are described at a high-level in
the Concepts draft. What this new draft does is provide
detailed descriptions of the mechanisms.

To provide a detailed description, we had to make a few
assumptions. The most important of these assumptions is that
SIP is the protocol for signaling Peer Protocol connections.
[Note that we are NOT saying that the Peer Protocol is SIP;
in fact, we were careful to assume as little as possible about
the nature of the Peer Protocol.]
The main reason we picked SIP is because it is a sophisticated
signaling protocol and already has security and NAT traversal
mechanisms defined.

The current version of the draft does not define any new SIP mechanisms,
but manages to do everything using existing SIP mechanisms,
albeit in new and interesting ways. In fact, this was the
interesting part in working on the draft . We new at the start
more or less what we wanted to do, and the challenge was to
figure out how to do this without having to extend SIP.

[I should add that some SIP and SDP extensions WILL be required
before everything is finalized,
to define for example, how to specify the Peer Protocol in SDP,
but our draft currently leaves these to be defined elsewhere.]

The draft has a file name of
           draft-matthews-p2psip-bootstrap-mechanisms-00
Until the draft shows up in the Internet-Draft archives,
you can pick up a copy on my website:
      www.magma.ca/~philip_matthews
I have also placed an HTML version of the draft there.

- Philip

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