A modified charter has been submitted for Next Steps in Signaling (nsis) in the Transport Area of the IETF. The IESG has not made any determination yet. The following description was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Next Steps in Signaling (nsis) ------------------------------- Current Status: Active Working Group Description of Working Group: The Next Steps in Signaling Working Group is responsible for standardizing an IP signaling protocol with QoS signaling as the first use case. This working group will concentrate on a two-layer signaling paradigm. The intention is to re-use, where appropriate, the protocol mechanisms of RSVP, while at the same time simplifying it and applying a more general signaling model. The existing work on the requirements, the framework and analysis of existing protocols will be completed and used as input for the protocol work. NSIS will develop a transport layer signaling protocol for the transport of upper layer signaling. In order to support a toolbox or building block approach, the two-layer model will be used to separate the transport of the signaling from the application signaling. This allows for a more general signaling protocol to be developed to support signaling for different services or resources, such as NAT & firewall traversal and QoS resources. The initial NSIS application will be an optimized RSVP QoS signaling protocol. The second application will be a middle box traversal protocol. It may be that a rechartering of the working group occurs before the completion of this milestone. Security is a very important concern for NSIS. The working group will study and analyze the threats and security requirements for signaling. Compatibility with authentication and authorization mechanisms such as those of Diameter, COPS for RSVP (RFC 2749) and RSVP Session Authorization (RFC 3250), will be addressed. It is a non-goal of the working group to develop new resource allocation protocols. Resource reservation and traffic engineering are out of scope of this working group. Additionally, third party signaling is out of scope of this working group. Mobility protocols and AAA work are out of scope of the working group. The work produced in this Working Group should work with existing IETF mobility and AAA protocols, including (but not limited to) Mobile IP, SeaMoby Context Transfer, etc. NSIS also welcomes participation and expression of requirements from non-IETF standards organization members, for instance 3GPP, 3GPP2 and ITU-T.
