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Generic Referral Object (grobj)

WG Name Generic Referral Object
Acronym grobj
Area Applications Area (app)
State BOF Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-grobj-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chairs Dan Wing, Sheng Jiang
Chat Room address https://zulip.ietf.org/#narrow/stream/grobj

Charter for Working Group

The purpose of a referral is to enable a given entity in a multiparty
application to pass information to another party. Existing referrals
are IPv4 address only (with implied port number) or are IPv4 address+port.
But, with IPv6 deployments and the need for compatibility with existing
IPv4 applications, referrals will need to be more generic, providing
a richer language for IPv4 and IPv6 address referrals, and fallbacks for
when neither of these is directly applicable.

This BOF will consider a proposed Generic Referral Object (GRO) to be
used for referrals. The proposed object is compact and is application-
independent. Both IPv4 and IPv6 schemes are supported, as well as
upper layer identifiers. Additional information to characterise an
enclosed reference is also includeded. To allow proper interpretation
of referrals, a new notion of scope identifiers is introduced. GRO's
richer language helps peers avoid address translators or tunnels and to
choose a reachable path with the desired characteristics.

See draft-carpenter-behave-referral-object

The purpose of the BOF is to expose these ideas to a wider spectrum
of people including Apps Area experts and to discuss whether to
take the ideas forward in the IETF.