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Concluded WG Internet Personal Appliance Control (ipac)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name Internet Personal Appliance Control
Acronym ipac
Area Internet Area (int)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-ipac-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chairs Simon Tsang, Stanley Moyer

Final Charter for Working Group

There is much interest in enabling networked personal appliances to
communicate with and control each other over the Internet. Although
there are numerous networking technologies which allow networked
personal appliances to operate within a single home environment or
domain, there is currently no support for control of these devices from
the Internet, or for interworking the various home networking
technologies. The ability to provide such support will radically
enhance the ability to provide exciting new services. The initial
proposals and ideas on this topic were submitted to the IETF SIP WG.

The purpose of the proposed working group is to develop an architecture
and framework for recommending (and if necessary, developing) protocols
which will enable communication with and control of Internet Personal
Appliances (IPAs).

For the purposes of the group, Internet Personal Appliances (IPAs) are
regarded as networked devices which share the following
characteristics:
(1) The ability to interact with the physical environment (either
through sensors or actuators); (2) Limited (or restricted) general
computational power, though the devices may possess high-computation
power for specific tasks such as image processing, or speech
recognition.

In general, IPAs will be groups of sensors and/or actuators with
limited
computational power, and networking capability. Some IPAs will be
portable, and will provide service in multiple locations. A subset of
these will be mobile; that is, they will provide service irrespective
of
their location, whether they are stationary or in transit. Examples of
IPAs include: controllable lamps, alarm clocks, washing machines,
cameras, door bells, temperature sensors, sprinklers, and garage doors.

The scope of the proposed Working Group will comprise the following
areas of study:

  • Architecture and framework for communication and control of Internet
    Personal Appliances over the Internet.

  • Control and communication protocol of Internet Personal Appliances
    over the Internet. Only protocols usable by IP hosts will be
    considered in this WG.

  • Naming and addressing for Internet Personal Appliances.

  • Internet Personal Appliance discovery and registration.

  • Security for Internet Personal Appliances.

The following deliverables are planned:

  1. Requirements document: This document will outline in detail the
    networking and protocol requirements for enabling secure
    peer-to-peer communication and control of Internet Personal
    Appliances.

  2. Architecture and framework document (including terminology):
    This document will describe a framework and architecture for
    supporting the networking, protocol and security requirements
    outlined in deliverable 1.

  3. Recommendations on protocols to realize the Internet Personal
    Appliance framework: As far as possible, this WG will not
    develop new protocols, but recommend existing protocols to re-use.

    Where appropriate, the WG will recommend extensions to existing
    protocols which will make them more suitable for use in the
    Internet Personal Appliance framework. Only protocols usable by
    IP hosts will be considered in this WG. All protocols developed
    or extended must provide a high-level of security, as outlined
    in deliverables 1 and 2.