Audio/Video Transport (avt)

Charter 
 
Chair(s):
     Stephen Casner  <casner@isi.edu>
 
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Description of Working Group:

The Audio/Video Transport Working Group was formed to specify protocols for
real-time transmission of audio and video over UDP and IP multicast.
The result may be independent protocols specific to each medium, or a
common, lightweight, real-time transport protocol may be extracted.

UDP transmission of audio/video is only sufficient for small-scale
experiments over fast portions of the Internet, but the transport
protocols produced by this Working Group should be useful on a larger scale in
the future when network-level resource management mechanisms are
deployed to provide low-delay service and to guard against unfair
consumption of bandwidth by audio/video traffic.

Similarly, initial experiments can work without any connection
establishment procedure so long as a priori agreements on port numbers
and coding types have been made.  To go beyond that, we will need to
address simple control protocols as well.  Since IP multicast traffic
may be received by anyone, the control protocols must handle
authentication and key exchange so that the audio/video data can be
encrypted.  More sophisticated connection management is the subject of
current research, and should be the topic of a follow-on working group.

Goals and Milestones: 
 
     Nov 91     Define the scope of the Working Group, and who might 
                contribute.  Our first step will be to solicit contributions of
                potential protocols from projects that have already developed 
                packet audio and video.  From these contributions we will 
                distill the appropriate protocol features.                     

     Jan 92     Conduct a teleconference working group meeting using a 
                combination of packet audio and telephone.  The topic will be a
                discussion of issues to be resolved in the process of 
                synthesizing a new protocol.  Make writing assignments for 
                first-draft documents.                                         

     Mar 92     Review first draft documents, determine necessary revisions.  
                Follow-up discussion will occur on mailing list.  Plan 
                implementations.                                               

     May 92     Teleconference meeting using implementations of draft 
                protocols.  Discuss draft revisions based on implementations, 
                submit as Internet Drafts.                                     

     Jul 92     Review updated draft, and assess whether these protocols should
                enter the standards track or be published only as experimental 
                protocols.  Make final revisions to drafts and give to IESG for
                publication as RFCs of appropriate type.