Subject: [Sigtran] M3UA future work proposal

From: Tolga Asveren <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 09:35:41 -0400

I personally interprete the decreased message traffic about M3UA as a sign
of increased maturity of it and also considering status of M3UA-IG and
M3UA-MIB (I believe also for M3UA-MIB we are quite close to the finish line
after the last tour of discussions)documents I would like to get opinions of
people about possible enhancements/extensions about M3UA.

My proposal is to have discussions about M3UA SG-SG communication(
www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-bidas-sigtran-sgsg-01.txt )and about
lossless- fail-over between SCTP associations(
www.openss7.org/docs/draft-bidulock-sigtran-corid-00.txt ).

Work about SG-SG communciation draft started initially as an attempt, to
define it for any UA, but currently it seems, considering M3UA case as first
step is a better approach. We also had some discussions about it in this WG,
but those discussions were stopped to focus more on the remaining issues in
M3UA draft (the current RFC). I tried to update SG-SG draft based on the
comments on those discussions,  and I tried especially to address the
questions, in which scenarios it might be usefull. The details are in the
draft but just to mention about it briefly, what SG-SG communciation brings
is both relaying and point-to-point communciation capabilities(for example
to be used for hybrid configurations,  for gateway components between
different networks,  for asymmetric routekeys at the endpoints etc....)

I believe SG-SG concept is a natural extension to RFC3332. It requires  3
new messages; 1 of them is necessary for route set congestion test procedure
in case one wants to utilize it in a hybrid scenario, and the other two are
necessary only for a very special scenario with changeover/changeback, again
in case of a hybrid configuration. I furthermore think, it won't take us too
long time, to bring this document to a level, which reflects the consensus
of the WG.

I very much would like to get opinions (positive or negative) about M3UA
SG-SG concept/draft and to stimulate responses I propose again to move it to
WG charter (experience shows, such a proposal is the best way to trigger
feedback, especially the negative ones).

    Tolga