Short form: I like this idea.
Real-Time Applications and Infrastucture (RAI) Area Description
The Real-Time Applications and Infrastructure Area develops protocols
and architectures for delay-sensitive interpersonal communications.
I'm not sure 'real time' is being used here in the same sense it might
be used outside IP communities, but that's a modest nit for now. (I liked
Yaakov Stein's "Interactive Services...." variant, though.)
Work
in this area serves an emerging industry whose applications and services
include voice and video over IP, instant messaging and presence. These
applications and services are "real-time" in the sense that delay
impedes human participation in the associated systems.
I think it would be nice to see explicit mention of delay-sensitive, online,
single|multi-player games.
To an extent that industry has 'rolled their own' protocols for server
discovery, client registration, patch/maps/mod download and upload,
lag/loss estimation and compensation, embedded voice channels, encoding
of player action streams (commands) and game world state updates
(snapshots), etc.
I'm not sure if there's a demand (yet) for any IETF WG to develop common
protocols and architectures for delay sensitive multi-party/player games,
but it would at least be worth flagging the possibility in the new Area's
description. (There's certainly been a small yet active community of
people studying how current and previous 'home brew' multiplayer game
protocols impact on networks, with papers at various workshops and
conferences over the past few years.)
cheers,
gja
--
Associate Professor Grenville Armitage
Director, Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures
http://caia.swin.edu.au
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