Hi all,
We are going to have the first teleconference since the February meeting today and I thought it would be a good idea to go through the status of the mobility work as well as the procedures we have agreed to follow with this work. I know this is quite short notice for today's teleconference (especially for those in the west coast of the USA), but I wouldn't want to spend too much time on these issues in the teleconference, so I'm sending them by mail. Comment, if you wish!
Status of the H.323 Mobility work: * A sceleton for the H.323 Annex H has been agreed by the ad hoc group. This sceleton is by no means the final "table of contents" for the annex, but at least it gives guidelines for the future work as well as makes it easier for the contributors to point out the specific parts of the annex that they want to address in their contributions. * H.246 Annex E was determined in the February meeting in Geneva. Still the annex is not quite ready and contributions will surely be welcome (I feel I can say this much on behalf of the editor of the annex, Mr. Reddy).
Procedures to be followed by the ad hoc group members: * We have chosen Mr. Paul Guram of Motorola as the unofficial moderator for the teleconferences between the Geneva and Osaka meetings. Mr Guram will assign the MD-numbers for the contributions to the teleconferences as well as act as the chairman during the conferences. We acknowledge the fact that neither the ad hoc group nor Mr. Guram as its unofficial moderator has any formal position inside ITU, but for the sake of progressing with the mobility work, the ad hoc group members (i.e. anyone who wishes to take part in the work) are encouraged to treat Mr. Guram as the chairman in the teleconferences. * At some point, we decided to include a prefix "[H.323Mobility:]" in the beginning of the subject of each mail sent to the SG16 reflector concerning the mobility issues. I think this is a good practice and we should continue following it. * We will agree on the issues to be discussed in each teleconference beforehand. These issues will be discussed first and if there is enough time for other issues (which in general, I really doubt), they will be bought up afterwards. I.e. the issue for today's teleconference was supposed to be the identification of Tiphon-style scenarios for H.323 Mobility work (and agreeing for them to be listed in the H.323 Annex H) as well as choosing one of these scenarios as the first one to be addressed. It seems, however, that only one contribution for today's teleconference is addressing these issues.
Suggestion for the future work schedule: * We will hopefully be able to agree on the scenarios today and choose the all-H.323 (or all-IP, whichever it will be called) as the first scenario to be addressed (this really has been the implicit first case so far anyway, but we probably need to formalize that). * Two contributions dealing with the "Locating a Gatekeeper" -issues have been brought forward for today's teleconference. Since this issue was not in the agenda for today, we will need to come back to it later (for other companies to be able to contribute on this), although I presume we will have time to discuss about the contributions today. Thus, I would suggest that these information flows would be one of the issues for the next teleconference. * Another issue I would suggest for the next teleconference is to identify first the typical composite network elements (i.e. "boxes" including a set of the functionalities defined in the H.323 Annex H architecture). By doing this we would find the most relevant interfaces to be addressed and standardized first (quite the same way as H.225.0 Annex G has defined some of the interfaces in the first version, but not all).
I guess that is all for now. I'll try to send some comments for the Intel and AT&T contributions already before the teleconference if I have time, but you'll be hearing from me in the teleconference at the latest...
------------------------------------------------ Jaakko Sundquist * +358 50 3598281 * Audere est Facere! jaakko.sundquist@nokia.com * ------------------------------------------------