[Taps] TAPS Documents for Charter Item 3

[Tommy Pauly <[e-mail]>]

Hello TAPS,

In Singapore, there was much discussion about where we go after the minset drafts, and what documents will form charter item 3:

3) Specify experimental support mechanisms to provide the Transport 
Services identified in work item 2. This document will explain 
how to select and engage an appropriate protocol and how to 
discover which protocols are available for the selected service 
between a given pair of end points. Further, it will provide a 
basis for incremental deployment. Work on this document will 
begin when the TAPS Transport Services have been specified.

Since it would be good to get convergence and adoption of documents in London, I’d like to take a stab at how we can structure the WG documents and start a discussion on this list to decide our collective approach.

At a high level, based on the work of NEAT, Post Sockets, Happy Eyeballs, Socket Intents, etc, it seems like the “support mechanisms” for TAPS are converging into categories (a) how to expose functionality in an Abstract API and (b) guidance on how to implement a library that provides TAPS functionality. These two categories are not unrelated, but have different audiences; Abstract APIs are aimed at adopters of a TAPS system, while the implementation guidance aspects are aimed at library and system implementers. The high-level concepts that bind these together form the overall TAPS architecture.

Looking at things in this way, I could imagine three documents, which would form the capstone of the TAPS work
1) TAPS Architecture: high level explanation of the approach and goals, how the API and implementations relate, and how the system is derived from the protocol surveys and minset. Defines consistent terminology for concepts used in the other documents.
2) TAPS API: document aimed at adopters taking advantage of a TAPS system: configuration, initiation of channels, listening/responding, data transfer, and maintenance.
3) TAPS Implementation Guide: document aimed at implementers on how to bring up connections (handling a multiplicity of paths, endpoints, and protocols), sending and receiving data through protocol stack instances, and interpreting configuration and system policy into decisions.

I believe that many (or all) of the outstanding documents we have in the WG already fall into one or more of the categories. Here’s a table with the three proposed documents as 1, 2, 3, and three aspects of a TAPS system/architecture as A, B, C:


A
B
C
1. TAPS Architecture
Connection Establishment
Data transfer
Policy and Path Selection
2. TAPS API
Initiator/Listener/Responder
Send/Receive
Intents and configuration
3. TAPS Implementation Guide
Protocol Racing, Path Racing, Happy Eyeballs
Protocol Stack Instance
Policy engine

In this table, we could see the existing documents contributing aspects to certain blocks:

draft-fairhurst-taps-neat: 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B, 2C, 3C
draft-trammell-taps-post-sockets: 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B, (2C), (3B)
draft-pauly-taps-guidelines: 3A, (1C)
draft-grinnemo-taps-he: 3A
draft-tiesel-taps-socketintents: 2C

This is a rough assignment and not necessarily exhaustive, but the point is that much of the content is probably already there is some form, and can be reinterpreted into these documents.

What do people think about this approach? Any aspects that are missed here that would need to be separate documents, or new sections across the documents?

Thanks,
Tommy