Re: [dispatch] PROPOSED CHARTER FOR ASAP (Automatic SIP trunking And Peering)

["Sreekanth Narayanan (sreenara)" <[e-mail]>]

All,

Here are the revisions to the proposed charter of ASAP (Automatic SIP trunking And Peering) after incorporating the latest comments. Suggestions/comments are welcome.


The deployment of a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based infrastructure in enterprise and service provider communication networks is increasing at a rapid pace. Consequently, direct IP peering between enterprise and service provider networks is quickly replacing traditional methods of interconnection between enterprise and service provider networks.

Currently published standards provide a strong foundation over which direct IP peering can be realized. However, given the sheer number of these standards, it is often not clear which behavioural subsets, extensions to baseline protocols and operating principles ought to be configured by the enterprise network administrator to ensure successful peering with a SIP service provider network. This lack of context often leads to interoperability issues between enterprise and service provider SIP networks resulting in a large number of support cases being opened with enterprise equipment manufacturers and SIP service providers. Subsequently, deployment times for SIP trunking between enterprise and service provider networks increase significantly.

This work would define a descriptive capability set, which is populated by a SIP service provider, and which, when communicated to an enterprise network, provides the enterprise network with sufficient information to setup SIP trunking with the SIP service provider. Such a capability set would not only result in SIP trunking deployment times being drastically scaled down, but also would result in a significant decrease in interoperability issues between enterprise and service provider network. Over the long run, operational costs for service providers and enterprise equipment manufactures would likely decrease as a result of fewer support cases.

This work would make use of HTTPS based framework that allows a SIP service provider to offload a detailed capability set to the enterprise network. HTTPS is used in favor of SIP for the following reasons:
1. While there are extensions to baseline SIP that could potentially allow a capability set to be communicated from the service provider to the enterprise network, none of these extensions are readily usable to achieve the objective of this work.
2. Any modifications to existing SIP-based extensions to fit the objective of this work would require equipment manufacturers to upgrade their SIP stacks.

The scope of activity includes:

* Define a robust capability set which encapsulates sufficient information to ensure smooth IP peering between enterprise and service provider SIP networks.
* Define a data model for the capability set.
* Extensibility of the data model to allow proprietary parameters to be encoded.
* A HTTPS-based transport mechanism using which the capability set is communicated from the service provider network to the enterprise network.
* A mechanism to discover the capability server hosted in the SIP service provider network

The following is out of scope:
* Extensions to SIP that enable an enterprise network to solicit and obtain a descriptive capability set from a SIP service provider.
* A workflow/mechanism that allows service providers to directly configure devices in the enterprise network.

The group will produce
* Requirements, Use Cases and Architecture draft.
* Specification for SIP Auto Peer.

This group will co-ordinate with the SIP core workgroup and the SIPConnect efforts carried out by the SIP Forum.

Milestones:
<Date TBD> Send protocol specification to IESG