[Stox] WG Review: SIP-TO-XMPP (stox)

Hi,

I have two comments concerning this charter. 

1. The way the Objectives section is written does not make clear whether the current scope of stox is dully defined as making out of the draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-* Proposed Standard RFCs, or whether other proposals for the same mapping functionality (if submitted) will be considered. 

2. It is very unusual that there are no proposed milestones for a document submitted for public review. I am pretty sure that the IESG will not approved the charter without seeing the milestones scheduled, so I suggest that they are made public before the IESG discussion. 

Thanks and Regards,

Dan

Subject: WG Review: SIP-TO-XMPP (stox)

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area. The IESG has not made any determination yet. The following draft charter was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by 2013-06-10.

SIP-TO-XMPP (stox)
------------------------------------------------
Current Status: Proposed WG

Chairs:
  Markus Isomaki <markus.isomaki@nokia.com>
  Yana Stamcheva <yana@jitsi.org>

Assigned Area Director:
  Gonzalo Camarillo <gonzalo.camarillo@ericsson.com>

Mailing list
  Address: stox@ietf.org
  To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/stox
  Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/stox/

Charter:

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 messaging/presence, whereas other deployed services use XMPP for both messaging/presence 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:

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

These documents are fairly 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 they have become expired due to inactivity.  Thus it would be helpful to polish them off and publish them as RFCs.

It might also be helpful to at some point publish additional documents in

the same series, covering topics like capabilities discovery and file transfer.  However, any such work would require a recharter.

The group shall not be tasked with defining any new protocols, only with specifying mappings between existing protocols that have been defined for SIP and XMPP.

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 6. Mapping for media signaling

All of the foregoing deliverables are standards track, since they are subject to interoperability testing.

Milestones:
TBD