Transport Area

Director:


   o Allison Mankin:  mankin@cmf.nrl.navy.mil


Area Summary reported by Allison Mankin/NRL

There are currently seven active working groups in the Transport
Services Area:


   o Audio/Video Transport (AVT)
   o Integrated Services (INTSERV)
   o Minimal OSI Upper-Layers (THINOSI)
   o Multiparty Multimedia Session Control (MMUSIC)
   o ONC Remote Procedure Call (ONCRPC)
   o Resource Reservation Setup Protocol (RSVP)
   o TCP Large Windows (TCPLW)


All groups except for THINOSI and ONCRPC met in Toronto.  THINOSI is
scheduled to conclude upon publication of ``Octet sequences for
upper-layer OSI to support basic communications applications'' (the
THINOSI ``cookbook'') an Informational RFC.



Audio/Video Transport Working Group (AVT)


The working group reached consensus that the revised Real-time Transport
Protocol (RTP) specification was ready for submission as a Proposed
Standard once a small number of items become fully specified.  The
revisions made to the specification, based on discussions from the
Seattle IETF meeting, were reviewed.  Open issues related to the
audio/video profile were discussed, as was profiles for packetization of
H.261, JPEG and MPEG video encodings.



Integrated Services Working Group (INTSERV)


The group needs to prepare an Internet-Draft that describes the proposed
service model in a straight-forward manner.  Presentations were given on
the service model, requirements on the switches, reservation interface,
multicast, and bounds on end-to-end latency.  The group is liaising with
areas in the IEEE 802 and ATM communities that are doing related work.


Multiparty Multimedia Session Control Working Group (MMUSIC)

The MMUSIC session focused on reports from implementors of a range of
multimedia conferencing applications, including CUSeeMe, the Jupiter
project, reliable multicast protocols to support the Xy shared windowing
system, CCCP, GCC, and an agreement algorithm under development at
Bellcore.  These reports were tied together with a definition of the
various interfaces that could be standardized to facilitate
interoperation between different applications and media agents.


Resource Reservation Setup Protocol Working Group (RSVP)

An interim meeting was held over the MBone at the end of June.  The
implementation status of RSVP (ISI and Sun) and CSZ packet scheduling
(MIT) was reviewed.  A list of major open issues was made.  Finally, a
walk-through of the RSVP specification was done.

There were two sessions in Toronto.  In the first seesion,
implementation updates were given for RSVP, an RSVP API, packet
schedulers and packet classifiers.  Also, a presentation was given, from
a long-term perspective, on the interaction between routing and resource
reservation.  In the second session, a presentation was made on how the
group should approach the routing--RSVP interaction problem in the short
term.  Next, a presentation was given on the reservation model; this was
the second part of a talk started in the Integrated Services Working
Group.  The list of major open issues was reviewed, with names being
attached to each one.  Finally, the plan for releasing and testing the
code for RSVP, the packet scheduling kernels, and modified versions of
vat, nv and sd was presented.