Internet Engineering Task Force SIPPING WG
Internet Draft J. Rosenberg
dynamicsoft
H. Schulzrinne
Columbia U.
draft-ietf-sipping-conference-package-00.txt
June 24, 2002
Expires: December 2002
A Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Event Package for Conference State
STATUS OF THIS MEMO
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
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Abstract
This document defines a conference event package for the SIP Events
architecture, along with a data format used in notifications for this
package. The conference package allows users to subscribe to a SIP
URI that is associated with a conference. Notifications are sent
about changes in the membership of this conference, changes in active
speaker, and media mixing information.
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Table of Contents
1 Introduction ........................................ 4
2 Terminology ......................................... 4
3 Conference Event Package ............................ 4
3.1 Event Package Name .................................. 5
3.2 Event Package Parameters ............................ 5
3.3 SUBSCRIBE Bodies .................................... 5
3.4 Subscription Duration ............................... 6
3.5 NOTIFY Bodies ....................................... 6
3.6 Notifier Processing of SUBSCRIBE Requests ........... 6
3.7 Notifier Generation of NOTIFY Requests .............. 6
3.8 Subscriber Processing of NOTIFY Requests ............ 6
3.9 Handling of Forked Requests ......................... 7
3.10 Rate of Notifications ............................... 7
3.11 State Agents ........................................ 7
4 Conference Data Format .............................. 7
4.1 Structute of the Format ............................. 8
4.1.1 User Element ........................................ 8
4.1.2 Status .............................................. 9
4.1.3 Dialog .............................................. 9
4.1.4 Media Status ........................................ 9
4.2 Constructing Coherent State ......................... 9
4.3 Schema .............................................. 10
4.4 Example ............................................. 13
5 Security Considerations ............................. 13
6 IANA Considerations ................................. 13
6.1 application/conference-info+xml MIME Registration
................................................................ 13
6.2 URN Sub-Namespace Registration for
urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:conference-info ......................... 14
7 Acknowledgements .................................... 15
8 Authors Addresses ................................... 15
9 Normative References ................................ 15
10 Informative References .............................. 16
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1 Introduction
The SIP Events framework [1] defines general mechanisms for
subscription to, and notification of, events within SIP networks. It
introduces the notion of a package, which is a specific
"instantiation" of the events mechanism for a well-defined set of
events. Packages have been defined for user presence [9], watcher
information [10], and message waiting indicators [11], amongst
others. Here, we define an event package for SIP conferences. This
package will work for any conference in which there is a central
signaling element [12].
The conferencing package allows a subscriber to learn about the
identities of participants and their status in the conference, the
dialogs that are used by each user, the media makeup of the
conference, and the mixing matrix (i.e., who is receiving whose
audio). This information is vital to building conferencing
applications using SIP.
2 Terminology
In this document, the key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED",
"SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY",
and "OPTIONAL" are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [2] and
indicate requirement levels for compliant implementations.
3 Conference Event Package
The conference event package allows a user to subscribe to a
conference. In SIP, conferences are represented by URIs. These URIs
route to a SIP user agent that is responsible for ensuring that all
users in the conference can communicate with each other. Detailed
information on conferencing models can be found in [12]. This package
can work with any of the tightly-coupled models described in that
specification. However, the conference server may not have complete
information on the media makeup of the conference. This is the case
for multicast-based conferences, where the server cannot know the
mixing matrix for the conference. In this case, that information
would simply not be reported through this package.
The specific information conveyed in notifications in this package
is:
o The SIP URI identifying the user.
o The dialog state associated with that users attachment to the
conference.
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o Their status in the conference (active, declined, departed).
o Their status in terms of receiving media in the conference.
This section provides the details for defining a SIP Events package,
as specified by [1].
3.1 Event Package Name
The name of this event package is "conference". This package name is
carried in the Event and Allow-Events header, as defined in [1].
3.2 Event Package Parameters
A single parameter, "recurse" is defined for this package. When
present, it informs the server that it should check whether any
participants in the conference are themselves conferences, and if so,
generate a subscription to their conference state with the "recurse"
attribute. The users reported in notifications from this recursed
subscription are reported to the original subscriber. The result is
that the list of users reported to the subscriber represents the
complete user list even when cascaded conferences are used.
Example:
Event: conference;recurse
3.3 SUBSCRIBE Bodies
A SUBSCRIBE for a dialog package MAY contain a body. This body
defines a filter to apply to the subscription.
A SUBSCRIBE for a conference package MAY be sent without a body. This
implies the default subscription filtering policy. The default policy
is:
o Notifications are generated every time there is any change in
the set of users participating in the conference, or a change
their state (dialog state, media mixing state, etc.)
o Notifications do not normally contain full state; rather, they
only indicate the state of the participant whose state has
changed. The exception is a NOTIFY sent in response to a
SUBSCRIBE. These NOTIFYs contain the complete view of
conference state.
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o For a given user, the notifications contain the identity
information and status.
3.4 Subscription Duration
The default expiration time for a subscription to a conference is one
hour. Of course, once the conference ends, all subscriptions to that
particular conference are terminated, with a reason of "noresource"
[1].
3.5 NOTIFY Bodies
The body of the notification contains a conference information
document. All implementations MUST support the type
"application/conference-info+xml", defined in Section 4. Other
formats MAY be supported.
When a client generates a SUBSCRIBE request, and that request
contains an Accept header, the "application/conference-info+xml"
format MUST be included in the header. Other formats MAY be listed.
The default value for the Accept header when it is not present in a
request is "application/conference-info+xml".
Of course, the notifications generated by the server MUST be in one
of the formats specified in the Accept header in the SUBSCRIBE
request.
3.6 Notifier Processing of SUBSCRIBE Requests
The conference information contains very sensitive information.
Therefore, all subscriptions SHOULD be authenticated and then
authorized before approval. Authorization policy is at the discretion
of the administrator, as always. However, a few recommendations can
be made.
It is RECOMMENDED that all users in the conference be allowed to
subscribe to the conference.
3.7 Notifier Generation of NOTIFY Requests
Notifications SHOULD be generated for the conference whenever a new
participant joins, a participant leaves, and a dial-out attempt
succeeds or fails. Notifications MAY be generated for the conference
whenever the media mixing status of a user changes.
3.8 Subscriber Processing of NOTIFY Requests
The SIP Events framework expects packages to specify how a subscriber
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processes NOTIFY requests in any package specific ways, and in
particular, how it uses the NOTIFY requests to contruct a coherent
view of the state of the subscribed resource.
Typically, the NOTIFY for the conference package will only contain
information about those users whose state in the conference has
changed. To construct a coherent view of the total state of all
users, a subscriber to the dialog package will need to combine
NOTIFYs received over time.
Notifications within this package can convey partial information;
that is, they can indicate information about a subset of the state
associated with the subscription. This means that an explicit
algorithm needs to be defined in order to construct coherent and
consistent state. The details of this mechanism are specific to the
particular document type. See Section 4.2 for information on
constructing coherent information from an application/conference-
info+xml document.
3.9 Handling of Forked Requests
By their nature, the conferences supported by this package are
centralized. Therefore, SUBSCRIBE requests for a conference should
not generally fork. Users of this package MUST NOT install more than
a single subscription as a result of a single SUBSCRIBE request.
3.10 Rate of Notifications
For reasons of congestion control, it is important that the rate of
notifications not become excessive. As a result, it is RECOMMENDED
that the server not generate notifications for a single subscriber at
a rate faster than once every 5 seconds.
3.11 State Agents
Conference state is ideally maintained in the element in which the
conference resides. Therefore, the elements that maintain the
conference are the ones best suited to handle subscriptions to it.
Therefore, the usage of state agents is NOT RECOMMENDED for this
package.
4 Conference Data Format
Conference information is an XML document [3] that MUST be well-
formed and SHOULD be valid. Dialog information documents MUST be
based on XML 1.0 and MUST be encoded using UTF-8. This specification
makes use of XML namespaces for identifying dialog information
documents and document fragments. The namespace URI for elements
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defined by this specification is a URN [4], using the namespace
identifier 'ietf' defined by [5] and extended by [6]. This URN is:
urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:conference-info
A conference information document begins with the root element tag
"conference-info".
4.1 Structute of the Format
Conference information begins with the top level element
"conference-info". This element has three mandatory attributes:
version: This attribute allows the recipient of conference
information documents to properly order them. Versions
start at 0, and increment by one for each new document sent
to a subscriber. Versions are scoped within a subscription.
Versions MUST be representable using a 32 bit integer.
state: This attribute indicates whether the document contains
the full conference information, or whether it contains
only information on those users whose state have changed
since the previous document (partial).
entity: This attribute contains a URI that identifies the
conference whose information is reported in the remainder
of the document.
The "conference-info" element has zero or more "user" sub-elements
which contain information on the users in the conference.
4.1.1 User Element
Each user element has zero or one "status" elements, indicating their
status in the conference, zero or one "dialog" elements, indicating
their dialog information, and zero or one "media-state" elements,
indicating their media reception information.
The user element has one mandatory attribute, "uri" that indicates
the URI for the user in the conference. This is a logical identifier,
not a machine specific one (i.e., its taken from the To/From, not the
Contact). The optional attribute "display-name" contains a display
name for the user. The standard "xml:lang" language attribute can
also be present to indicate the language of the display name.
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4.1.2 Status
The status element contains the status of the user in the conference.
The following statuses are defined:
active: The user is in an active dialog with the conference
host.
departed: The user sent a BYE, thus leaving the conference.
booted: The user was sent a BYE by the conference host, booting
them out of the conference.
failed: The server tried to bring the user into the conference,
but its attempt to contact the specific user resulted in a
non-200 class final response.
4.1.3 Dialog
The dialog element is defined in [7].
4.1.4 Media Status
The "media-status" element indicates the types of media that the user
is currently receiving in the conference. It consists of a series of
"media-stream" sub-elements, each of one describes a particular media
stream. Each "media-stream" element has a mandatory "media-type"
attribute that indicates the MIME media type for the stream. There is
also an optional "send-status" and "recv-status" attribute which
attribute which indicates the status of the media to/from that user.
If the "send-status" is "received-by-all", it means that the media
for that stream that is being generated by the user is being mixed by
the server and sent to all recipients. "muted" means that no one is
receiving their media. If it is "unknown", the server does not know
the status, perhaps because the media is being distributed via
multicast or multi-unicast.
If the "recv-status" is "receiving-all" it means that the user is
hearing all other participants. If it is "anchor-only", the user is
hearing media from just a single participant. If it is "unknown", the
server does not know the status, perhaps because the media is being
distributed via multicast or multi-unicast.
4.2 Constructing Coherent State
The conference information subscriber maintains a table for the list
of users in the conference. The table contains a row for each user.
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Each row is indexed by a URI, present in the "uri" attribute of the
"user" element. The contents of each row contain the state of that
user as conveyed in the document. The table is also associated with a
version number. The version number MUST be initialized with the value
of the "version" attribute from the "conference-info" element in the
first document received. Each time a new document is received, the
value of the local version number, and the "version" attribute in the
new document, are compared. If the value in the new document is one
higher than the local version number, the local version number is
increased by one, and the document is processed. If the value in the
document is more than one higher than the local version number, the
local version number is set to the value in the new document, the
document is processed, and the subscriber SHOULD generate a refresh
request to trigger a full state notification. If the value in the
document is less than the local version, the document is discarded
without processing.
The processing of the conference information document depends on
whether it contains full or partial state. If it contains full state,
indicated by the value of the "state" attribute in the "conference-
info" element, the contents of the table are flushed. They are
repopulated from the document. A new row in the table is created for
each "user" element. If the document contains partial state, as
indicated by the value of the "state" attribute in the "conference-
info" element, the document is used to update the table. For each
"user" element in the document, the subscriber checks to see whether
a row exists for that user. This check is done by comparing the URI
in the "uri" attribute of the "user" element with the URI associated
with the row. If the user doesn't exist in the table, a row is added,
and its state is set to the information from that "user" element. If
the user does exist, its state is updated to be the information from
that "user" element. If a row is updated or created, such that its
state is now booted, failed or departed, that entry MAY be removed
from the table at any time.
4.3 Schema
The following is the schema for the application/conference-info+xml
type:
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OPEN ISSUE: We need to register the schema for the dialog
info package in order to have a stable reference for it in
the conference info schema above.
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4.4 Example
The following is an example conference information document:
active
active
This document describes a conference with two users, both of which
are active.
5 Security Considerations
Subscriptions to conference state can reveal very sensitive
information. For this reason, the document recommends authentication
and authorization, and provides guidelines on sensible authorization
policies.
Since the data in notifications is sensitive as well, end-to-end SIP
encryption mechanisms using S/MIME SHOULD be used to protect it.
6 IANA Considerations
This document registers a new MIME type, application/conference-
info+xml and registers a new XML namespace.
6.1 application/conference-info+xml MIME Registration
MIME media type name: application
MIME subtype name: conference-info+xml
Mandatory parameters: none
Optional parameters: Same as charset parameter application/xml
as specified in RFC 3023 [8].
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Encoding considerations: Same as encoding considerations of
application/xml as specified in RFC 3023 [8].
Security considerations: See Section 10 of RFC 3023 [8] and
Section 5 of this specification.
Interoperability considerations: none.
Published specification: This document.
Applications which use this media type: This document type has
been used to support SIP conferencing applications.
Additional Information:
Magic Number: None
File Extension: .cif or .xml
Macintosh file type code: "TEXT"
Personal and email address for further information: Jonathan
Rosenberg,
Intended usage: COMMON
Author/Change controller: The IETF.
6.2 URN Sub-Namespace Registration for
urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:conference-info
This section registers a new XML namespace, as per the guidelines in
[6].
URI: The URI for this namespace is
urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:conference-info.
Registrant Contact: IETF, SIMPLE working group,
, Jonathan Rosenberg
.
XML:
BEGIN
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Dialog Information Namespace
Namespace for Dialog Information
application/conference-info+xml
See RFCXXXX.