Subject: Re: [Simple] Suggested next actions with draft-ietf-simple-interdomain-scaling-analysis

From: "Bernard Aboba" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:33:22 -0800

This sounds attractive in that it will enable us to focus on the general
scaling issues without getting into a (potentially endless) debate about
the validity of particular assumptions and calculations. 

Although the resulting (more abstract) document would not be specific
to SIMPLE, as long as the performance model still applies, it seems 
plausible that this proposal could still potentially satisfy the charter
item. 

Peter said: 

"When Avshalom and I spoke recently, we discussed the idea of a "more
general" treatment of the topic of presence scalability, but did not get
into specifics of what that would mean. Here is my take...

Each of the current drafts discusses a particular technology (SIMPLE or
XMPP). However, at a higher level of abstraction I think that *any*
presence technology is going to have a non-trivial network impact,
simply because of the multiplicative nature of presence (when I come
online or change my presence or go offline, that information will be
multicasted to tens or hundreds or in my case thousands of people).

Therefore, rather than talking about SIMPLE or XMPP or any other
particular presence technology, I think it would be appropriate to
discuss at a higher level how presence behaves on the network. That
means abstracting from SIMPLE and XMPP. It means making some assumptions
about presence in general, but I think there are enough commonalities
between the presence technologies we know best to make this fairly
straightforward. It means talking about ranges with regard to the size
of presence notifications, but both of the analyses already talk about
ranges with regard to the number of buddies and other factors, so that
is not a big change. It means dropping the competition between SIMPLE
and XMPP about who's better, but that was never very productive in the
first place and we've removed the comparative stuff from the I-Ds in
question long ago. And so on.

Whether this work belongs in the SIMPLE WG or can be pursued as an
independent submission is a matter for the chairs to decide, but I'm
still convinced that it is appropriate for the IETF to analyse the
network impact of presence technologies. No, presence doesn't have the
impact of voice or video, but its impact is non-trivial and deserves to
be documented so that operators can take the impact into account when
deciding to deploy SIMPLE, XMPP, or any other technology."