Full text of DOI:10.1109/MIC.2000.845394

with a built-in H.323 client. However,
H.323 has several limitations that
inhibit its deployment (notably, a long
setup time and large “footprint”),
which SIP has overcome in the interop-
NARDS
erability implementations that are part
of the IETF standards process.
The interworking BOF discussed
the possible formation of a WG to
speed development of the interworking
OPENST
specification and thereby speed the
availability of products that could use
SIP. The BOF, however, did not achieve
consensus on this point. For one thing,
the authors of the interworking draft
En d -to -En d In te rn e t: are also working on the SIP WG stan-
dards-track RFCs, so there is some
inefficiency in a separate WG.
IETF Look s a t W ire le ss
But the lack of consensus may also
represent some ambivalence about
convergence altogether. IP telephony
stresses the Internet to do things it
wasn’t designed to do, and the activi-
ties to accommodate such applica-
Lin d a Wo rld • IEEE Internet Computing • lworld@computer.org
“Our products underlie a global infra- evolved from the original Arpanet tions potentially compromise the fea-
structure, and squabbles over my solu- Network Working Group. tures that make the Internet a
tion to get venture capital for my firm All meetings are open to anyone uniquely interoperable platform.
have less and less place here,” declared who pays the fee to attend, just as the
Fred Baker, chair of the Internet mailing lists are open to anyone who End -to-End Tra nsp a re ncy
Engineering Task Force and its steer- signs up and the RFC standards track or “ Wa lle d Ga rd e ns”
ing group, the IESG.
and other documentation is available Rapid growth of the market for hand-
Not that the IETF’s 47th meeting in free to anyone who wants to down- held devices has spawned a different
Adelaide, Australia, looked overrun by load them; see the sidebar, “Not All problem. The wireless industry has
venture capitalists. Still, as the association RFCs Are Standards (and Internet- adopted standards such as the Wireless
that creates Internet standards and relat- Drafts Never Are).”
ed documents, the IETF processes deci-
sions every day that affect the future of To Conve rg e or Not
Application Protocol, which offers
browser-like access to a subset of
Internet sites that use its protocol suite
too many companies not to make Baker’s Among the 110 groups meeting in to meet the bandwidth and screen
admonishment meaningful. Venture cap- Adelaide, several addressed issues relat- restraints of handheld devices, while
italists are just one source of difficulty as ing to the International Telecommuni- sacrificing interoperability with stan-
the IETF struggles to retain something cation Union, and the ongoing conver- dard Internet services.
technologically unique while it is being gence between traditional telephony
A representative from the WAP
Forum gave an overview of the archi-
co-opted by global economic forces.
services and the Internet.
For example, the SIP-H.323 Inter- tecture and protocol suite at the 47th
working BOF focused on an “Internet- meeting plenary. In follow-up ques-
draft” specification for establishing calls tions and discussion, WAP was char-
Work ing Group s a nd
Bird s of Fe a the r
Three times each year, the IETF holds between these competing standards. acterized as “a walled garden” that
a meeting where its working groups Session Initiation Protocol is an IETF compromises the “end-to-end princi-
(WGs) can meet face-to-face to dis- proposed standard RFC for initiating ple” of the Internet, which is based on
cuss their chartered activities, which interactive communication sessions a single addressing scheme and unal-
are otherwise conducted primarily between users; SIP is part of the overall tered flow of packets from source to
through mailing lists.
IETF multimedia data and control destination. Intranets are one inter-
The three annual meetings also architecture. H.323 is ITU-T’s stan- ruption of this scheme. More recently,
include birds-of-feather (BOFs) inter- dard for packet-based multimedia com- Network Address Translators have
est groups to address unchartered munications systems; the first version been introduced to overcome the
activities. If the BOF achieves consen- appeared in 1996, and the H.323 pro- scarcity of addresses arising from
sus, it can submit a proposed WG tocol suite supports most current IP IPv4’s 32-bit address space.
charter and workplan to the directors telephony networks. Perhaps more
The plenary also included a presen-
of one of eight IETF “areas” that important, Microsoft Windows ships tation of NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode
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O
P
E
N
S
T
A
N
D
A
R
D
S
technology, an alternative to WAP. the workshop was to ensure the suit- “ Kille r Ap p ” fo r IPv6 ?
After only a year in service, i-mode has ability of the standard Internet proto- One reason for the focus on hand-
more than 5 million subscribers in cols for the wireless environment. helds, however, could be the potential
Japan and a business model that prof- There were many presentations and of wireless devices as “the killer app”
itably offers cheap always-on access to lots of discussion, particularly around for IPv6. This next-generation version
sites enabled with the technology. the idea of losing end-to-end connec- of IP requires changes to existing
A third presentation, titled “End- tivity in the Internet. IAB member infrastructure in exchange for a bigger
to-End IP Connectivity over 3G Steve Deering told me afterward that IP address space and other advanced
Cellular,” addressed problems that some people feel the Internet is features. IPv4 can’t accommodate the
must be solved to retain the “end-to- already so chopped up that you number of addresses required for pro-
end principle” of IP connectivity in wouldn’t be able to develop an appli- jected wireless devices, and efforts to
third-generation mobile telecommu- cation like the Web any more.
nications systems, which are expected One participant suggested that the are already spawning technologies like
to mitigate the bandwidth constraints IETF should not let the requirements NATs, which interrupt end-to-end
accommodate IPv4’s address scarcity
on cellular networks.
of handhelds overrun protocol devel- connectivity for application support.
opment when, in fact, the biggest With some market forecasts pro-
wireless applications area may end up jecting the number of handhelds to
IAB Work shop De b rie fe d
The morning after the plenary, the being in machine-to-machine envi- exceed 500 million by 2003, an end-
Internet Architecture Board debriefed ronments. Fred Baker noted that the to-end Internet will need a 128-bit
a workshop held in February on wire- IAB had invited representatives from address space.
less internetworking. The IAB provides NASA and the air traffic wireless
architectural oversight for the evolu- applications to present at the work- Linda World is the managing editor of IEEE
tion of the Internet, and one goal of shop to address this issue specifically.
Internet Computing.
Not All RFCs Are Standards (and Internet-Drafts Never Are)
RFC-x
The Request For Com-
ments series of Internet
standards-related docu-
ments began in 1969, as
part of the Arpanet pro-
ject. RFCs 1 and 2 were
memos titled “Host Soft-
ware,” written by, respec-
tively, Steve Crocker of
UCLA and Bill Duvall of
SRI. In RFC 3, “Documen-
tation Conventions,” the
authors were identified as
two among five members
of the Network Working
Standards-Track
Proposed
Sources of specification
IETF
Working Groups
Draft documents
Draft
Internet Engineering
Steering Group
STD-x
RFC editor
Internet Architecture
Board
BCP-x
Internet-Draft
IESG
Individuals
Informational
Experimental
Historic
Group: “Membership is not closed. The NWG is concerned
with the [Arpanet] Host software, the strategies for using the
network, and initial experiments with the network.
Documentation is through notes such as this. Notes may be
produced at any site by anybody and included in this series.”
More than 30 years and 3,000 RFCs later, the process publication as RFCs. Unrevised documents in the directo-
has been formalized considerably to support the growth ry have a maximum life of six months.
and importance of the Internet as a global communica-
tions data infrastructure; it is nevertheless a remarkably in 1992 (RFC 1311), but the RFC process a s a whole
open and inclusive process. accommodates “off-track” technical specifications that are
The standards-track subseries of RFCs was established
Anyone can submit a document to the RFC editor (a either experimenta l or informa tiona l a s well a s “Best
function of the Internet Society). Internet-Drafts are not Current Practice” documentation to develop consensus on
archival documents, but the I-D directory provides a tem- policy and operational issues.
porary repository for authors to solicit comments on doc-
Current I-Ds and all RFCs can be accessed and down-
uments they may eventually wish to submit to the IESG for loaded from the IETF website at http:/ / www.ietf.org.
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