TURN Revised and Modernized
charter-ietf-tram-00-01

Traversal Using Relays around NAT (TURN) was published as RFC 5766 in April 2010. Until recently the protocol had only a rather limited deployment. This is primarily because its primary use case is as one of the NAT traversal methods of the Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) framework (RFC 5245). This inherent dependency on ICE combined with the fact that ICE itself was slow to achieve widespread adoption because other alternative mechanisms were historically used by the VoIP industry were the causes of the initial lack of interest. This situation has changed drastically as ICE, and consequently TURN, are mandatory to implement in WebRTC, which is a set of technologies developed at the IETF and W3C aiming to enable Real Time Communication on the Web.

Because of the ubiquity of the Web and of the new opportunities created by the arrival of WebRTC, there is a renewed interest in TURN and ICE, as evidenced by the recent work updating the ICE framework, as well as standardizing the URIs used to access a STUN [RFC7064] or TURN [RFC7065] server.

The goal of the TRAM Working Group is to consolidate the various initiatives to update TURN and STUN, including the definition of new transport, authentication mechanisms, and extensions, that make STUN and TURN more suitable for the WebRTC environment. The Working Group will closely coordinate with the appropriate Working Groups, including RTCWEB, MMUSIC, and HTTPBIS.