IN/Internet Interworking in Support of Software Switches
draft-slutsman-softswitch-00

Abstract

The goal of this document is to identify and propose a new work item for the IETF. To this end, the document defines the term 'software switch' for the purposes of describing a mechanism by which existing PSTN Intelligent Network (IN) service control can be reused in IP networks. IP telephony is one application that can benefit from this mechanism, but there are other potential applications of interest (for example, Unified Messaging) which this draft does not address. Specifically, the document illustrates the role of the software switch in IP telephony. The document then narrows, for practical purposes, the scope of the software switch so as to identify an architecture and mechanism for interworking of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Intelligent Network Application Part Protocol (INAP). The so defined mechanism can be implemented as an application layer protocol, when architectural entities reside in different machines, or inter-process communications protocol, if they reside in the same machine. It is the proposal of this document to define at a minimum a meta-protocol (from which particular implementations can be derived) as a work item in the IETF. Some (but not all) parts of this work have already been discussed in the IETF. To help delineating the proposed work item, this Internet draft explains how it relates to the efforts of the existing IETF working groups that deal with the protocols for PSTN/Internet interworking (IPTEL, MEGACO, PINT, SPIRITS, and SIGTRAN) and ITU-T.

Authors

Igor Faynberg
Hui-Lan Lu
Lev Slutsman

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)