Transport and Services Area

Director(s):


   o David Borman:  dab@cray.com


Area Summary reported by David A. Borman/Cray Research

A major item of interest in the Transport and Services Area is that, as
of the end of Columbus IETF meeting, the Area no longer exists.  In its
place are now two new Areas, the Transport Area and the Service
Applications Area.  David Borman has stepped down from the IESG. Allison
Mankin is the new Area Director for Transport, and David Crocker is the
new Area Director for Service Applications.

For the Working Groups that were in the old Transport and Services Area,
they will now be assigned as:


   o Transport:

      -  Audio/Video Transport Working Group
      -  TCP Large Windows Working Group

   o Service Applications:

      -  Distributed File Systems Working Group
      -  Domain Name System Working Group
      -  Service Location Protocol Working Group
      -  Trusted Network File Systems Working Group


Of these Working Groups, three of them met at the Columbus IETF meeting.
Summaries of their meetings follow.  Please refer to the Minutes of each
Working Group for more details.

Audio/Video Transport Working Group (AVT)

In the AVT sessions, some open issues were discussed that had come up
since the presentation of the draft Realtime Transport Protocol
specification at the previous meeting.  The primary items discussed at
this meeting were:


   o Elimination of IPv4 addresses carried within RTP;
   o Separation of RTCP control functions not related to transport; and
   o The addition of security services and mechanisms to the protocol
     based on a proposal presented by Stuart Stubblebine.


No roadblocks were identified, but resolution of some of the questions

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will be left to email discussion.  It is our intention to update the
Internet-Drafts in May to be ready for RFC approval in June.

The third Working Group session was an ``implementors agreement''
discussion to promote convergence and interoperation among the audio and
video programs using RTP. Ron Frederick presented a proposed API that
would allow the various video programs to share decoding subroutines so
they could all decode each other's data.  Christian Huitema described
the complex state involved in H.261 decoding and explained how it would
be difficult to implement a decoder to process each packet separately as
proposed in the API. The solution may be to treat the list of packets in
an RTP synchronization unit as an application layer frame to be
processed as a unit for decoding.  The software video programs are now
being converted from monochrome to color, and Paul Milazzo proposed a
standard color representation based on CCIR 601 YCrCb.

Domain Name System Working Group (DNS)

The DNS Working Group spent some time discussing the future of the
Group.  Items that had been completed or were no longer applicable were
removed from the Charter.  Three sub-groups were formed to address
specific issues:


   o Scaling problems of ``big zones'' like the .COM zone, to be led by
     Bill Manning.
   o DNS Security, to be led by James Galvin.
   o Load balancing, to be led by Tom Brisco and Stuart Vance.


The DNS MIB was discussed.  There still exist some non-trivial problems
due to differences in the ``SNMP way'' and ``DNS way'' of doing things.
Frank Kastenholz and the DNS MIB authors will be addressing this.

Susan Thomson gave a presentation on DNS support for PIP. Three problems
were discussed by the Group.  Recommendations were made on how to
address two of the problems, but the was third left open due to time
constraints.

The final discussion item was the proposed X.400 ``temporary'' routing
mechanism, which uses the DNS to replace X.400 routing tables.  Serious
flaws in the proposal were discussed.  The results of the discussion
were presented to the authors of the document two days later.  A better
solution was agreed upon, and will be documented by Claudio Allocchio.

Service Location Protocol Working Group (SVRLOC)

The SVRLOC Working Group met twice.  The sessions were spent conducting
a technical review of just over half of the current Internet-Draft.
Some of the items reviewed during the first session include:



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   o Network interactions between the user agent and the servers;
   o Server timeout of cached information; and
   o Resending of broadcast queries.


The second session reviewed the packet structure, and had a presentation
and discussion of internationalization issues.



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