On 02/02/11 11:19, Henry Sinnreich wrote:
Re: [dispatch] [RTW] Does RTC-WEB need to pick a signaling protocol? Is there some understanding on the list on how the IP addresses in SDP can be reconciled with the USAF RFC 3424?
Nit: UNSAF, not USAF.
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3424.txt

“...
a process whereby some
   originating process attempts to determine or fix the address (and
   port) by which it is known - e.g. to be able to use address data in
   the protocol exchange, or to advertise a public address from which it
   will receive connections.
There are only heuristics and workarounds to attempt to achieve this
   effect; there is no 100% solution.  Since NATs may also dynamically
   reclaim or readjust translations, "keep-alive" and periodic re-
   polling may be required.  Use of these workarounds MUST be considered
   transitional in IETF protocols, and a better architectural solution
   is being sought.  The explicit intention is to deprecate any such
   workarounds when sound technical approaches are available.”
In our case, the answer that has proved workable is called STUN.

Obviously there is much more dead stuff in SDP besides using the misleading IP addresses, but this seems to be a deep architectural flaw.
There were some early attempts to do SDPng and we know today much more:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-mmusic-sdpng-07

Why not replace SDP, since it deals only with a/v codec negotiation with a more general, standards based metadata approach?
For example including Web conferencing displays and UI control capabilities.
Of course such a new approach must be easily mapped to the existing global SIP VoIP infrastructure.

Or are the no  “
sound technical approaches” available at all?
I'm all in favour of replacing SDP, but would not like to require that before we can produce any output from this group.

Justin's idea of sorting out what information we need and specifying how that maps into SDP (just like is currently done by Jingle) might be a reasonable approach that can allow us to not fossilize SDP's misfeatures forever.

                       Harald