One document matched: draft-peterson-modern-problems-00.txt
Network Working Group J. Peterson
Internet-Draft T. McGarry
Intended status: Informational NeuStar, Inc.
Expires: September 9, 2015 March 8, 2015
Modern Problem Statement and Framework
draft-peterson-modern-problems-00.txt
Abstract
The functions of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) are
gradually migrating to the Internet. This is generating new
requirements for many mechanisms used by the PSTN, including
telephone numbers (TNs). TNs no longer serve simply as telephone
routing addresses, they are now identifiers which may be used by
Internet-based services for a variety of purposes including session
establishment, identity verification and service enablement. This
problem statement examines how the existing tools for allocating and
managing telephone numbers do not align with the needs of the
Internet environment and proposes a fraemwork for Internet-based
services relying on TNs.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on September 9, 2015.
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Table of Contents
1. Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Use Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.1. CSP Acquires Numbers from Authority . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.2. User Acquires Numbers from Authority . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.3. Accessing Numbering Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.3.1. Privileged Access for Government Entities . . . . . . 6
4.4. Service Management for Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Problem Statement
The challenges of utilizing telephone numbers (TNs) on the Internet
has been known for some time. Internet telephony provided the main
use case for routing telephone numbers on the Internet in a manner
similar to how calls are routed in the public switched telephone
network (PSTN). As the Internet had no service for discovering the
endpoints associated with telephone numbers, ENUM [3] created a DNS-
based mechanism for resolving TNs in an IP environment by defining
procedures for translating TNs into URIs for use by protocols such as
SIP [2]. Originally, it was envisioned that ENUM would be deployed
as a global hierarchical service, though in practice it has only been
deployed piecemeal by various parties. The DRINKS [4] framework
showed ways that authorities might provision information about
telephone numbers at an ENUM service or similar Internet-based
directory. These technologies have generally tried to preserve the
features and architecture familiar from the PSTN numbering
environment.
Telephone numbering, however, has long been transitioning away from a
provider-centric model towards a user-centric model. Number
portability has been implemented in many countries, and the right of
a user to choose and change their service provider while retaining
their TN is widely acknowledged now. However, TN administration
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processes rooted in PSTN technology and policies dictate that this be
an exception process fraught with problems and delays. Thanks to the
increasing sophistication of consumer mobile devices, users now
associate telephone numbers with many applications other than
telephony. Ideally the user would have full control of their TN and
would drive the porting process on their own rather than rely on
complex and time consuming back office processes among multiple
service providers.
Most TNs today are assigned to specific geographies, at both an
international level and within national numbering plans. This has
shaped the way that service providers interconnect, as well as how
telephone numbers are routed and administered: the PSTN was carefully
designed to delegate switching intelligence geographically. In
interexchange carrier routing in North America, for example, calls to
a particular TN are often handed off to the terminating service
provider close to the geography where that TN is assigned. But the
overwhelming success of mobile telephones has increasing eroded the
connection between numbers and regions. Furthermore, the topology of
IP networks is not anchored to geography in the same way that the
telephone network is. In an Internet environment, establishing a
network architecture for routing telephone numbers would depend
little on geography.
While some properties of ENUM have been successfully deployed, others
have not. Most notably, ENUM is mostly used as an internal network
function, and is hardly used between service provider networks. The
original ENUM concept of a single root, e164.arpa, proved to be
politically challenging, and less centralized models have thus
flourished. The industry also came to realize that there were
limitations in the DNS protocol and it may not be a good fit for a
communications protocol that would need more security, richer
datasets and more complex query and response capabilities. The TeRQ
proposal [12], a framework and information model for "telephone-
related queries," proposes a reconsideration of telephone routing and
administrative services by focusing on what data needs needs to be
shared rather limiting the data to fit within the particular
protocols chosen to carry it.
With the PSTN well on its way to becoming an all IP network and TNs
showing no signs of sunsetting as a resource, it is time to address
the issues of routing, management and administration of TNs in an IP
environment. This document will create a common understanding of the
problem statement related to TNs in an IP environment and help
develop a vision for how to create IP-based mechanisms for TNs. It
will be important to acknowledge that there are various international
and national policies and processes related to TNs, and any solutions
needs to be flexible enough to account for these variations.
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2. Actors
The following actors are defined in this document:
Numbering Authority: An entity that manages an inventory of
allocated and unallocated telephone numbers. This may be a root
authority, such as a national regulator, or any delegate of the
root authority that dispenses numbers to other parties.
Communication Service Provider: A provider of communications
services to users, where those services can be identifed by
telephone numbers. This includes both traditional telephone
carriers and service providers with no presence on the PSTN who
use telephone numbers. It also encompasses users who operate
services on their own behalf.
User: An operator of communications endpoints, either as an
individual or an organization; usually a customer of a
communication service provider who uses telephone numbers to reach
and identify services.
Government Entity: An entity that, due to legal powers resulting
from the root of number authority, has privileged access to
information about number allocation.
3. Framework
The framework outlined in this document requires three Internet-based
mechanisms for managing and resolving telephone numbers (TNs) in an
IP environment. These mechanisms will likely reuse existing
protocols for sharing structured data; it is unlikely that new
protocol development work will be required, though new information
models specific to the data itself will be a major focus of framework
development. Likely candidates for reuse here include work done in
DRINKS and WEIRDS, as well as the TeRQ framework.
These protocol mechanisms are scoped in a way that makes them likely
to apply to a broad range of future policies for number
administration. It is not the purpose of this framework to dictate
number policy, but instead to provide tools that will work with
policies as they evolve going forward. These mechanisms therefore do
not assume that number administration is centralized, nor that number
"ownership" is restricted to any privileged service providers, though
these tools must and will work in environments with those
propoerties.
The three mechanisms are:
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Acquisition: a protocol mechanism to enable users or CSPs to acquire
TNs from authorities, including an enrollment process for the
individuals and entities that manage TNs.
Management: a protocol mechanism for users to associate data with
TNs at a CSP.
Retrieval: a protocol mechanism for service providers, users, and
governemnt entities to retrieve data about TNs from either an
authority or a CSP.
The acquisition mechanism will enable actors to acquire telephone
numbers for use with a communications service. The acquisition
mechanism will provide a means for either a user or a CSP to request
numbering resources from an authority, either on a number-by-number
basis, or as inventory blocks. The authority who grants numbering
resources to a user will retain metadata about the assignment,
including the responsible organization or individual to whom numbers
have been assigned. In the DNS environment, an authority thus might
be analagous to either a registrar or a reseller of names, though
obvious hierarchical domain names do not have a comparable inventory
situation to telephone numbers.
The management mechanism will let actors provision data associated
with telephone numbers at CSPs. If a user owns a telephone number,
they may select a CSP to provide particular service associated with
the number, or a CSP may own a number, and effectively rent these to
users. In either case, a user needs a mechanism for provision data
associated with the number at a CSP.
The resolution mechanism will enable actors to learn information
about telephone numbers, typically by sending a request to a CSP.
For some information, an actor may need to send a request to a
numbering authority rather than a CSP. Different parties may be
authorized to receive different information about telephone numbers.
4. Use Cases
4.1. CSP Acquires Numbers from Authority
TBD.
4.2. User Acquires Numbers from Authority
TBD.
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4.3. Accessing Numbering Data
TBD.
4.3.1. Privileged Access for Government Entities
TBD.
4.4. Service Management for Numbers
TBD.
5. Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Henning Schulzrinne for his contributions to
this problem statement and framework.
6. IANA Considerations
This memo includes no request to IANA.
7. Security Considerations
TBD.
8. Informative References
[1] Peterson, J. and C. Jennings, "Enhancements for
Authenticated Identity Management in the Session
Initiation Protocol (SIP)", RFC 4474, August 2006.
[2] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston,
A., Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E.
Schooler, "SIP: Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261,
June 2002.
[3] Bradner, S., Conroy, L., and K. Fujiwara, "The E.164 to
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Dynamic Delegation
Discovery System (DDDS) Application (ENUM)", RFC 6116,
March 2011.
[4] Channabasappa, S., "Data for Reachability of Inter-/Intra-
NetworK SIP (DRINKS) Use Cases and Protocol Requirements",
RFC 6461, January 2012.
[5] Watson, M., "Short Term Requirements for Network Asserted
Identity", RFC 3324, November 2002.
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[6] Jennings, C., Peterson, J., and M. Watson, "Private
Extensions to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for
Asserted Identity within Trusted Networks", RFC 3325,
November 2002.
[7] Hoffman, P. and J. Schlyter, "The DNS-Based Authentication
of Named Entities (DANE) Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Protocol: TLSA", RFC 6698, August 2012.
[8] Elwell, J., "Connected Identity in the Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP)", RFC 4916, June 2007.
[9] Schulzrinne, H., "The tel URI for Telephone Numbers", RFC
3966, December 2004.
[10] Rosenberg, J. and C. Jennings, "The Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP) and Spam", RFC 5039, January 2008.
[11] Peterson, J., Jennings, C., and R. Sparks, "Change Process
for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Real-
time Applications and Infrastructure Area", BCP 67, RFC
5727, March 2010.
[12] Peterson, J., "A Framework and Information Model for
Queries about Telephone-Related Queries (TeRQ)", draft-
peterson-terq-03 (work in progress), February 2013.
[13] Barnes, M., Jennings, C., Rosenberg, J., and M. Petit-
Huguenin, "Verification Involving PSTN Reachability:
Requirements and Architecture Overview", draft-jennings-
vipr-overview-06 (work in progress), December 2013.
[14] Rosenberg, J. and H. Schulzrinne, "Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP): Locating SIP Servers", RFC 3263, June
2002.
Authors' Addresses
Jon Peterson
Neustar, Inc.
1800 Sutter St Suite 570
Concord, CA 94520
US
Email: jon.peterson@neustar.biz
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Tom McGarry
Neustar, Inc.
1800 Sutter St Suite 570
Concord, CA 94520
US
Email: jon.peterson@neustar.biz
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