Internet DRAFT - draft-elwell-bliss-ach-analysis
draft-elwell-bliss-ach-analysis
BLISS WG J. Elwell
Internet-Draft Siemens Enterprise Communications
Intended status: Informational GmbH & Co KG
Expires: May 12, 2008 November 9, 2007
An Analysis of Automatic Call Handling Implementation Issues in the
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
draft-elwell-bliss-ach-analysis-00.txt
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Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).
Abstract
This discusses problems associated with automatic call handling (ACH)
when using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).
This work is being discussed on the bliss@ietf.org mailing list.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Examples of ACH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Known problem areas with ACH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Conflict between proxy and UA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Conflict between UAs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Obtaining information from UA for ACH at proxy . . . . . . 5
3.4. Informing the calling UA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.5. Scope of conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.6. Configuring the proxy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. Proxy versus UA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2. Avoiding inconsistent configurations . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Enterprise and carrier environments . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. IANA considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. Security considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. Ackowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . . 11
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1. Introduction
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) (RFC 3261 [1] establishes calls
or sessions for real-time communication between users. When a call
is targeted at a called user, often the call is subject to some
automatic treatment to determine whether to present the call to the
user or take some alternative action such as forwarding to voicemail.
Similarly, if some condition arises after presenting a call to the
called user but before answer, automatic treatment can lead to some
alternative action. Automatic treatment is in accordance with policy
determined in advance by the user or the user's organization. This
automatic treatment of incoming calls is referred to as automatic
call handling (ACH) in this document.
In order to encourage innovation, ACH is deliberately not specified
in RFC 3261 or in RFCs that specify extensions to SIP. However, the
flexibility that this affords has sometimes led to problems, where
different implementations have approached the issue in different
ways, leading to unexpected and often unwanted behavior when those
implementations are deployed together. This document analyses the
sources of problems with ACH.
2. Examples of ACH
ACH can occur prior to or instead of presenting an incoming call to a
called user or after presentation but before the called user answers
the call. The particular treatment applied to a call is generally
dependent on a number of factors, examples of which are as follows:
o Whether there are other registered contacts that can handle the
call (e.g., a registered audio UA for an audio call).
o Whether the user's UA (or UAs) is known to be busy on another
call.
o Whether the user has failed to answer the call within a given
number of seconds.
o Whether the user is known to be unwilling to receive calls at the
present time (a condition often known as Do Not Disturb, DND).
o Whether the user is known not to be available (e.g., on vacation)
o Whether an alternative user (e.g., a colleague, an assistant,
another family member) is known to be available.
o Whether the AoR at which the call is targeted represents a single
user or a team or group of users.
o Time of day, day of the week, date, etc..
o The type of call (e.g., audio, audio plus video, messaging, etc.).
o The source of the call (e.g., whether the caller is anonymous,
whether the caller is blacklisted or whitelisted, which
organization the caller belongs to, etc.).
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Examples of particular treatment to be applied to a call if
appropriate conditions are met are as follows:
o Reject the call, with an appropriate indication to the caller.
This indication may or may not reveal the actual condition that
led to rejection.
o Forward the call to another UA serving that user (e.g., voicemail,
a mobile UA, a UA at another location).
o Forward the call to another user, e.g., the next member of a team,
an assistant.
o Modify the nature of the call (e.g., downgrade from audio to
messaging).
o Any of the above, but impacting presentation of the call at a
given UA, without impacting presentation at other UAs serving the
user.
A user can specify quite complex sets of rules for ACH. For example,
"if presence indicates I am in a meeting, or if my desk phone is
busy, or if I do not reply within 15 seconds, forward calls to my
assistant between the hours of 09.00 and 17.00, Monday to Friday, but
at other times forward to my voicemail, unless the call is from my
home or my partner's mobile phone, in which case forward to my mobile
phone".
3. Known problem areas with ACH
3.1. Conflict between proxy and UA
A significant problem area with ACH is interactions between proxies
(or B2BUAs) that perform ACH and UAs that perform ACH. The domain
proxy for a user is configured to treat incoming calls in a certain
way under certain conditions. One of the user's UAs is configured to
treat incoming calls in a different way under the same or overlapping
conditions. If the condition can be detected by the proxy without
presenting the call to the UA, the proxy will win and the user may
wonder why the action configured at the UA is not being taken. For
example, if the proxy detects a DND condition from a presence server
and forwards calls to voicemail, any script at the UA to forward
private calls to a mobile phone would never execute. This may or may
not be what the user (or his/her organization) desires to happen.
Alternatively, if a condition is detected by a UA before it is
detected at the proxy, the action determined by the UA will "win",
unless the proxy is somehow able to figure out what has happened and
apply its own action. For example, if a phone determines it is busy
and returns a 302 response code to forward the call elsewhere or
performs "call waiting" action, this might prevent the proxy taking
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whatever action it would have taken on receipt of a 486 response.
This may or may not be what the user (or his/her organization)
desires to happen.
3.2. Conflict between UAs
Where an incoming call is forked to multiple UAs, there is potential
for different UAs to be configured to perform different actions under
the same or overlapping conditions. With parallel forking (where the
INVITE request is sent to each UA at approximately the same time),
results can be indeterminate and are likely to depend on which UA
responds first. With serial forking, this is likely to be more
deterministic, but UAs would need to be configured taking into
account the order in which the proxy presents calls to the UAs.
3.3. Obtaining information from UA for ACH at proxy
When ACH is performed at a proxy, it sometimes requires information
from the UA, in response to the INVITE request. If this information
does not arrive in the form expected by the proxy (e.g, a particular
response code), ACH will be adversely impacted. For example, if the
proxy is configured to perform forwarding on DND and relies on the
DND condition to be indicated in the INVITE response, it depends on
the UA indicating the condition in the form expected by the proxy.
As there is no standardized means of indicating DND in a response
(see [6]), this can be a problem.
3.4. Informing the calling UA
A related problem is informing the calling UA, and hence the caller,
what has happened. In the case where ACH results in rejection of the
call, this might be just a case of sending back an appropriate
response code. Considerations are similar to those for a proxy in
Section 3.3, except that privacy might require the proxy to send a
different response code rather than the one reflecting the condition
encountered. For example, the user might not wish the caller to know
about his absence.
The choice of response code might not be an interoperability issue if
the calling UA is relatively dumb, but might be an issue if there is
an application that takes the response code into account.
Where ACH results in forwarding (to a different AoR or a different
contact for the same AoR), this can be achieved by retargeting or
redirection. In the case of retargeting, the calling UA receives no
information, apart from a final response and perhaps identity from
the retargeted-to user. On the other hand, if redirection is used,
the calling UA will receive a 3xx response, the contact URI in which
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could indicate the source of the redirection and the reason, in
accordance with RFC 4458 [5].
3.5. Scope of conditions
When an INVITE request is forked to multiple UAs, the user may or may
not require a condition at one UA to be considered as applying to
other branches. This includes branches already active (through
parallel forking) or branches yet to be activated (through serial
forking). This can impact when to invoke ACH at the proxy, i.e.,
whether to perform ACH when one UA reports an appropriate condition
(cancelling other active branches if necessary) or to wait for the
outcome on other branches.
Although to a large extent this issue can be handled by appropriate
scripting at the proxy, an important consideration is how to treat
the 6xx class of responses. For example, if a UA issues a 600 Busy
Everywhere response (as opposed to a 486 Busy response), what is the
scope of "everywhere"? A simple interpretation is that it literally
means "everywhere", and all other branches should be abandoned and
the 6xx response passed back to the caller if no other ACH is
prescribed for this condition. However, this interpretation is not
always reasonable. If a user has several phones, it might be
reasonable to interpret a 600 response from one phone as meaning that
all other phones are busy, but if the user also has voicemail it is
unlikely that that too should be treated as busy. Also, if ACH
requires forwarding to a different user (different AoR) on busy, it
might be expected that this would take place even on receipt of a 600
response from a UA.
Another example is the 603 Decline response code. This is often is
intended to be applied everywhere.
3.6. Configuring the proxy
If ACH is performed at the proxy, the user needs a means to configure
the proxy with the required rules. There is no SIP means of doing
this, but a number of mechanisms can perform the basis for this task,
e.g.:
o Via a web page.
o By uploading a CPL [3] script.
o Via a web services interface based on SOAP.
o Via Computer Supported Telecommunication Applications (CSTA) [8].
Without a single standardized way of configuring a proxy, there is a
danger that the UA and proxy might not support a common method,
requiring the user to employ other means (e.g., using a different
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device, contacting a support centre). Furthermore, it might lead the
user to configuring ACH at the UA when in practice ACH at the proxy
would serve the user's needs better.
Related to this is the means by which a UA (and hence the user) can
discover how the proxy is configured.
4. Discussion
4.1. Proxy versus UA
The end-to-end principle of SIP would suggest that ACH at the UA is
more appropriate than ACH at the proxy. However, certain
considerations make ACH at the proxy more viable or even essential.
ACH in the event that there is no registered contact obviously can
only be performed by the proxy.
A proxy is more easily able to take account of the state of other
UAs, e.g., by waiting for all branches of a forked call to respond
before invoking ACH. Although a UA can use techniques such as the
registration event package (RFC 3680 [2]) in combination with the
dialog event package (RFC 4235 [4]) to determine the state of other
UAs, this is complex, may not yield the information required, and may
suffer from timing-related inconsistencies.
A proxy needs to be configured once and can perform ACH independently
of the number of UAs involved. Obtaining consistent behaviour using
ACH at the UA may involve configuring multiple UAs and keeping their
configurations aligned. The UA configuration framework [7] may be a
suitable mechanism for this and would require a means for the user to
configure the profile delivery server. However, there can be no
guarantee that all UAs will download a revised configuration at the
same time, so it can lead to a time window when inconsistent
behaviour may occur.
With these considerations in mind, a proxy will often turn out to be
a more suitable place for performing ACH.
On the other hand, there may be situations in which UA-specific ACH
may be required, and it may not be feasible to configure the proxy to
provide this level of granularity. For example, it may be required
to take one action if the desk UA is busy but a different action if
the mobile UA is busy. Convincing use cases for this are hard to
find, but it cannot be ruled out. A possible approach here is to use
proxy-based ACH as the default handling for all UAs and UA-based ACH
for any UA-specific exceptions.
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4.2. Avoiding inconsistent configurations
Given that there is frequently a need to perform ACH at the proxy,
problems can be avoided by turning off ACH at all UAs. There may be
exceptions to this, e.g., where there is need for a specific UA to
perform actions different from default actions carried out by the
proxy, or where there is a requirement for behavior not supported by
the proxy. Where ACH does need to be configured at one or more UAs,
care must be taken to avoid unintentional conflicts. Use of the SIP
configuration framework can help to ensure consistent handling at all
UAs. One consideration during the work on profiles for use with the
SIP configuration framework might be the downloading of policy
relating to ACH, such that ACH could be suppressed in order to ensure
that proxy-based ACH operates correctly.
4.3. Enterprise and carrier environments
Considerations for ACH will often differ between enterprise and
carrier environments. In enterprise environments, enterprise policy
will often govern what a user can and cannot do. This does not
necessarily mean that ACH will be done at a proxy, because the
enterprise will probably manage UAs too and ensure that they behave
in line with policy, although proxy-based ACH will often be easier to
accomplish.
In a carrier environment, everything can be expected to be under the
control of the user. Proxy-based ACH is still relevant, however,
particularly for mobile devices that are often out of reach or turned
off.
Handling such as team calls (where any team member can be selected
according to availability) is perhaps more likely in enterprise,
although in a residential environment it could be used for finding
any family member.
Despite these different considerations, requirements are similar to a
large extent and the same solution should be sought for both
environments.
5. Conclusions
The discussions above raise a number of questions, which need to be
addressed by the BLISS WG:
o Do we need to make any recommendations on proxy-based versus UA-
based ACH?
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o Is provisioning (e.g, using the SIP configuration framework [7]) a
suitable solution for ensuring consistent behaviour between UAs
and between a UA and its proxy?
o Do we need to make any recommendations on error codes and other
information in responses in order to achieve good interoperability
between a UAS and its proxy?
o Do we need to make any recommendations concerning the meaning and
use of 6xx response codes?
o Do we need to specify a recommended or default method by which a
UA can configure its proxy and discover how its proxy is
configured?
o To what extent is it necessary to make recommendations concerning
keeping the calling UA informed of what is happening?
6. IANA considerations
None.
7. Security considerations
This document just discusses issues relating to DND. It does not
define any new protocol or practices and therefore does not introduce
any security issues, other than the possible user desire not to
disclose a DND condition to callers.
8. Ackowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Jason Fischl,
Shida Schubert and Srivatsa Srinivasan in writing this draft, and
also input on specific implementations from various members of the
BLISS WG.
9. Informative References
[1] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston, A.,
Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E. Schooler, "SIP:
Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3880, June 2002.
[2] Rosenberg, J., "A Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Event
Package for Registrations", RFC 3680, March 2004.
[3] Lennox, J., Wu, X., and H. Schulzrinne, "Call Processing
Language (CPL): A Language for User Control of Internet
Telephony Services", RFC 3880, October 2004.
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[4] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., and R. Mahy, "An INVITE-
Initiated Dialog Event Package for the Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP)", RFC 4235, November 2005.
[5] Jennings, C., Audet, F., and J. Elwell, "Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP) URIs for Applications such as Voicemail and
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)", RFC 4458, April 2006.
[6] Elwell, J. and M. Vakil, "SIP: Session Initiation Protocol",
draft-elwell-bliss-dnd-00 (work in progress), May 2007.
[7] Petrie, D. and S. Channabasappa, "A Framework for Session
Initiation Protocol User Agent Profile Delivery",
draft-ietf-sipping-config-framework-13 (work in progress),
October 2007.
[8] "International Standard ISO/IEC 18051 "Information Technology -
Telecommunications and information exchange between systems -
Services for Computer Supported Telecommunications Applications
(CSTA) Phase III"".
Author's Address
John Elwell
Siemens Enterprise Communications GmbH & Co KG
Hofmannstrasse 51
D-81379 Munich
Germany
Phone: +44 115 943 4989
Email: john.elwell@siemens.com
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