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SIP-TO-XMPP
charter-ietf-stox-00-00

The information below is for an older proposed charter
Document Proposed charter SIP-TO-XMPP WG (stox) Snapshot
Title SIP-TO-XMPP
Last updated 2013-06-12
State IESG Review (Charter for Approval, Selected by Secretariat)
WG State Proposed
IESG Responsible AD Ben Campbell
Charter edit AD Gonzalo Camarillo
Send notices to Markus.Isomaki@nokia.com, yana@jitsi.org, stpeter@stpeter.im, Gonzalo.Camarillo@ericsson.com

charter-ietf-stox-00-00

Problem Statement

The IETF has defined two signalling technologies that can be used
for multimedia session negotiation, instant messaging, presence,
file transfer, capabilities discovery, notifications, and other types
of real-time functionality:

o The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), along with various SIP
extensions developed within the SIP for Instant Messaging and
Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group.

o The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), along
with various XMPP extensions developed by the IETF as well as by
the XMPP Standards Foundation.

SIP has been focused primarily on media session negotiation (e.g., audio
and video), whereas XMPP has been focused primarily on messaging and
presence. As a result, the technologies are mostly complementary.
However, there is also some overlap between SIP and XMPP, since there
are SIP extensions for messaging, presence, groupchat, file transfer,
etc., and there are XMPP extensions for multimedia session negotiation.
This overlap has practical implications, since some deployed services
use SIP for both media and messaging/presence, whereas other deployed
services use XMPP for both messaging/presence and media. When such
services wish to exchange information, they often need to translate
their native protocol (either SIP or XMPP) to the other protocol (either
XMPP or SIP).

Implementers needing to perform such protocol mappings have often worked
out their own heuristics for doing so. Unfortunately, these heuristics
are not always consistent, which can lead to interoperability problems.

Objectives

To make it easier for implementers to enable interworking between
SIP-based systems and XMPP-based systems, several Internet-Drafts have
defined guidelines for protocol mapping between SIP and XMPP, starting
with draft-saintandre-xmpp-simple-00 in early 2004. The current
documents are:

draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-core
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-presence
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-im
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-chat
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-groupchat
draft-saintandre-sip-xmpp-media

These documents are fairly stable and the authors have received feedback
from a number of implementers over the years. However, implementers do
not always know about these documents because they are Internet-Drafts
and sometimes they have become expired due to inactivity. Thus it would
be helpful to polish them off and publish them as RFCs.

It might also be helpful to at some point publish additional documents in
the same series, covering topics like capabilities discovery and file
transfer. However, any such work would require a recharter.

The group shall not be tasked with defining any new protocols, only with
specifying mappings between existing protocols that have been defined for
SIP and XMPP.

Deliverables

  1. Address mapping and error handling
  2. Presence mapping
  3. Mapping for single instant messages
  4. Mapping for one-to-one text chat sessions
  5. Mapping for multi-user text chat sessions
  6. Mapping for media signaling

All of the foregoing deliverables are standards track, since they are
subject to interoperability testing.