To: IETF-Announce: ; Cc: RFC Editor , IANA Cc: Internet Architecture Board Cc: sip@lists.bell-labs.com From: The IESG Subject: Protocol Action: DHCP Option for SIP Servers to Proposed Standard Date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 17:51:19 -0500 Sender: scoya@cnri.reston.va.us Content-Length: 1821 The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'DHCP Option for SIP Servers' as a Proposed Standard. This document is the product of the Session Initiation Protocol Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Allison Mankin and Scott Bradner. Technical Summary The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control protocol that can establish, modify and terminate multimedia sessions or calls. The SIP WG is developing its particular use for signaling of Internet telephony calls. A SIP system has two components: user agents and servers. The user agent is the SIP end system that acts on behalf of someone who wants to participate in a SIP call. SIP-DHCP specifies a DHCP option that allows SIP user agents (clients) to locate a local SIP server that is to be used for outbound SIP requests, the outbound proxy server. The SIP client obtains a DNS string via a DHCP option. This string is then used by the mechanism specified by the recently published Proposed Standard, Locating SIP Servers, to locate the outbound proxy server. This is one of many possible solutions for locating the outbound SIP server. Working Group Summary The SIP working group supported this proposal. The proposal was also given working group last call and very carefully reviewed by the DHC Working Group. Originally the DHCP and server location specifications were in one draft. The IESG requested the two be separated and the server location draft was advanced to Proposed Standard recently. Protocol Quality This document was reviewed for the IESG by Allison Mankin. The DHCP usage was reviewed in tremendous detail by Thomas Narten and Ralph Droms, and corrections were made and Last Called to bring the work in line with other DHCP usage of DNS names.