Subject: [protocol]Summary of Protocol WG breakout sessions from March IPDR.org quar terly meeting Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 19:01:19 -0700 From: Ken Sarno To: "'protocol@ipdr.metratech.com'" CC: Ken Sarno Protocol Working Group Summary of Breakout Sessions held at the IPDR.org March quarterly meeting Attendees --------- Aron Heintz IPDR.org Jeff Meyer HP Ken Sarno NARUS Mike Ullrich Amdocs Kiran Sheth AbilitiSolutions Ty Roach Ace*Comm Paul Mishorich AbilitiSolutions Kevin Zhang Xacct Bill Holtz NEC Ivan Kuntz Openet Telecom Reinhard Bruhns Siemens John Bowen HNC Software Sara Knapp Telecordia Steve Cotton Cotton Management Consulting Chris Kirk Virtual Summit David Collins Sprint PCS Next Conference Call -------------------- Wednesday April 4th, 2001 @ 1pm EDT/10am PDT Dial-in number (404)774-4117 passcode: 6373 Goals for the Next Six Months ----------------------------- 1. Refine the File-based Transfer Protocol (have this ready for the NDM-U 2.6 in June) We discussed the following topics: 1. How do we deal with aging of IPDRdocs? What are the likely scenarios that producers will use for aging? What infrastructure do we need to support these? 2. More formally define the format of the capability file. 3. How do we deal with multiple subscription groups and multiple logfiles for each subscription group? In particular, how do we let consumers know where to find subscription groups AND logfiles? Action Items ------------ Owner Opened Closed Action ---------- -------- --------- --------------------------------------------------- Paul M. 03/27/01 Create an XML Schema that defines the capability file Steve C. 03/27/01 Describe situations in which undetected gaps and duplicates caused by transmit failures may occur within the file transfer scenario. Aron H. 03/27/01 Outline possible aging scenarios for IPDRdocs. Use this summary as a starting point for coming up with an infrastructure to support aging of IPDRdocs. Paul M. 03/27/01 Create an entry in the capability file that exposes the aging policy being used by the IPDR transmitter. Paul M. 03/27/01 Propose a detailed solution for representing multiple subscription groups in the capabilty file. Need to a mechanism to point consumers to ALL active logfiles for each supported subscription group. 2. Develop a compact encoding (have this ready for the NDM-U 3.0 in Q4 2001) Current XML encoding is useful: + industry adoption + validatable + open source tools + self describing But has potential limitations: - size of payload is large - processing requirements for XML parsing are non-trivial - communication efficiency may be poor We'd like to develop a compact encoding that retains the self describing nature of XML, but has less processing and encapsulation overhead (ie higher information density than XML). Jeff reviewed many possible candidates: 1. Self describing delimitted ASCII records. Easy to debug (since humans can read the files by hand). Intuitive. In use. Narus is willing to offer their implementation. We could also design one from scratch. 2. TLV. Tag length value format. This is a binary encoding: header + body. Header describes length and type of data. 3. ASN.1. Industry standard. Not well liked. Would not be self describing. 4. CORBA XDR. Industry standard. 5. DIAMETER AVPs. Emerging standard. DIAMETER also defines a transfer protocol which would make subsequent development of an IPDR transfer protocol for this new compact encoding much easier. This is a particular implementation of the TLV encoding style mentioned in #2. DIAMETER is an IETF draft, which they have been working on for 2 years. You can find more info at: http://www.diameter.org 6. WAP Binary XML encoding. Not completely self describing. Constrained to be what you can represent in XML. But it would build upon what we already have. 7. XML tables, as defined in NDM-U 1.0. 8. Use an existing telecom exchange format, like BAF. This probably won't work since it isn't extensible. And we'd need to get approval from the appropriate commitees. Not very feasible. Jeff is leaning toward either #1 Self describing delimitted records or #5 DIAMETER. Jeff is willing to make a contribution to implement DIAMETER as our compact encoding format. Action Items ------------ Owner Opened Closed Action ---------- -------- --------- --------------------------------------------------- Jeff M. 03/28/01 Write up a statement that explains the merits of using DIAMETER as our compact encoding. All 03/28/01 Discuss encoding alternatives with our senior engineers and relay results to the working group. 3. Develop a reference implementation of the SOAP-based transfer protocol. After much lengthy discussion, the working group decided to put this on the backburner. I will send out a more lengthy description of what was discussed regarding this in the next day or so. _______________________________________________ Protocol mailing list Protocol@ipdr.metratech.com http://ipdr.metratech.com/mailman/listinfo/protocol