[dispatch] Charter Proposal: SIP-XMPP Mapping

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

Charter Proposal: SIP-XMPP Mapping
DISPATCH WG
IETF 86, Orlando

Problem Statement

The IETF has defined two signalling technologies that can be used
for multimedia session negotiation, instant messaging, presence,
file transfer, capabilities discovery, notifications, and other types of
real-time functionality:

o  The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), along with various SIP
   extensions developed within the SIP for Instant Messaging and
   Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group.

o  The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), along
   with various XMPP extensions developed by the IETF as well as by
   the XMPP Standards Foundation.

SIP has been focused primarily on media session negotiation (e.g. audio
and video), whereas XMPP has been focused primarily on messaging and
presence.  As a result, the technologies are mostly complementary.
However, there is also some overlap between SIP and XMPP, since there
are SIP extensions for messaging, presence, groupchat, file transfer
(etc.) and there are XMPP extensions for multimedia session negotiation.
This overlap has practical implications, since some deployed services
use SIP for both media and (broadly) messaging, whereas other deployed
services use XMPP for both messaging and media.  When such services wish
to exchange information, they often need to translate their native
protocol (either SIP or XMPP) to the other protocol (either XMPP or
SIP).

Implementers needing to perform such protocol mappings have often worked
out their own heuristics for doing so.  Unfortunately, these heuristics
are not always consistent, which can lead to interoperability problems.

Objectives

To make it easier for implementers to enable interworking between
SIP-based systems and XMPP-based systems, several Internet-Drafts have
defined guidelines for protocol mapping between SIP and XMPP, starting
with draft-saintandre-xmpp-simple-00 in early 2004.  The current
documents are:

draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-core
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-presence
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-im
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-chat
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-groupchat

These documents are quite stable and the authors have received feedback
from a number of implementers over the years.  However, implementers do
not always know about these documents because they are Internet-Drafts
and sometimes have expired.  Thus it would be helpful to polish them off
and publish them as RFCs (and perhaps other documents in the same series,
covering topics like media signalling, capabilities discovery, and file
transfer).

Deliverables

1. Address mapping and error handling
2. Presence mapping
3. Mapping for single instant messages
4. Mapping for one-to-one text chat sessions
5. Mapping for multi-user text chat sessions

Any additional work would require a recharter.

Milestones

To be determined.

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