Announcing Packetizer Open Community Specifications

Packetizer is pleased to announce the creation of a set of specifications referred to as the Packetizer Open Community Specifications (POCS). These specifications are intended to document new protocols or extensions to existing protocols that are created by the public at large.

The first specification published (POCS-1) is titled “Using OPTIONS to Query for Operational Status in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)” and is a document the authors tried to publish through the IETF. It failed to gain traction, not because equipment manufacturers are not implementing the procedures (they are, actually), but because trying to get consensus in the IETF is sometimes like herding a bunch of cats. Rather than expending significant effort trying to jump through hurdles, the authors decided to publish the specification so there is a permanent record, but outside the IETF.

The second document published (POCS-2) is titled “Transmission of a Session Capacity Estimate (SCE) to Prevent Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Server Overload” and represents a valid and proven approach to preventing overload of SIP entities, particularly devices like Session Border Controllers. In this case, the IETF opted to limit the scope of their work such that SBCs and similar devices could not benefit from the defined overload mechanism. Specifically, the scope of the work in the IETF was on stateless entities like stateless SIP proxies. In the real world, there are many SBCs and a better approach is needed.

Packetizer would like to extend an invitation to the Packetizer community to publish new and different specifications as POCS documents. The type of documents that would be accepted include anything that might be of interest to the Packetizer community, including extensions to existing communication protocols, new web protocols, protocols for cloud computing support, etc.