ECRIT K. Wolf Internet-Draft nic.at Expires: September 4, 2009 March 3, 2009 Location-to-Service Translation Protocol (LoST) Extension: ServiceListBoundary draft-wolf-ecrit-lost-servicelistboundary-01 Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on September 4, 2009. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2009 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents in effect on the date of publication of this document (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info). Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Abstract LoST maps service identifiers and location information to service contact URIs. If a LoST client wants to discover available services for a particular location, it will perform a Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 1] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 query to the LoST server. However, the response from the LoST server does not provide information about the geographical region for which the returned service list is valid. Therefore, this document proposes a ServiceListBoundary. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. LoST Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.1. Extensions to . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.2. Retrieving the serviceList Boundary via getServiceListBoundary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.3. Service List Boundary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.4. Implementation Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.4.1. Server Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.4.2. Client Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4. Security & Privacy Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6. Acknowledgement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 7. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 2] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 1. Introduction Location based service providers as well as Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) only serve a specific geographic region. Therefore the LoST protocol defines the ServiceBoundary, which indicates the service region for a specific service URL. However, not all services are available everywhere. Clients can discover available services for a particular location by the query. The LoST server returns a list of services that are available at this particular location. But the server does not inform the client for which geographical region the returned service list is valid. This may lead to the situation where a client initially discovered all available services by the query, and then moves to a different location while refreshing the service mappings, but does not notice the availability of another service. The following imaginary example illustrates the problem for emergency calling: The client is powered-up, does location determination (resulting in location A) and performs an initial query with location A requesting urn:services:sos. The LoST server returns the following services list: urn:service:sos.police urn:service:sos.ambulance urn:service:sos.fire The client does the initial LoST mapping and discovers the dialstrings for these services. Then the client moves, refreshing the service mappings when necessary as told by the ServiceBoundary. However, when arriving in location B (close to a mountain), service sos.mountainrescue is available, which was not available in location A. Nevertheless, the client does not detect this, because only the mapping of the initially discovered services (police, ambulance, fire) are refreshed. Consequently, the dialstring for the mountain rescue is not known by the client, and the emergency call to the mountain rescue service will certainly fail. Note that the ServiceBoundary (service region for an individual service) cannot be considered as an indicator for the region a specific service list is valid for. The service list may even change within the ServiceBoundary of another service. For example, the ambulance mapping is valid for a whole state, but for a part of the state there is an additional mountain rescue service. Consequently, there are two ways to tackle this issue: Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 3] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 o clients continuously ask for the service list, although it may not have changed o a boundary information (telling the client that the service list does not change inside this area) Since the LoST protocol has the ServiceBoundary concept in order to avoid that clients continuously try to refresh the mapping of a specific service, a ServiceListBoundary would provide a similar mechanism for service lists. 2. Terminology The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119]. 3. LoST Extensions This chapter describes the necessary modifications to the LoST protocol in order to support the proposed ServiceListBoundary in a similar way as the ServiceBoundary. 3.1. Extensions to The query may contain an additional serviceListBoundary element to request the boundary for the service list returned, either by value or by reference. In the sample below the value of the serviceListBoundary element ist set to value: Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 4] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 AT Lower Austria Wolfsthal Hauptplatz 1 2412 urn:service:sos value A possible response is shown below: xmlns:slb="TBD" urn:service:sos.ambulance urn:service:sos.fire urn:service:sos.gas urn:service:sos.mountain urn:service:sos.poison urn:service:sos.police AT Lower Austria Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 5] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 This response above indicates that the service list is valid for Lower Austria. The request has to be repeated only when moving out of Lower Austria. However, the mappings of the services itself may have other service boundaries. Additionally, the expires attribute indicates the absolute time when this service list becomes invalid. The boundary can also be requested by reference when setting the attribute serviceListBoundary to "reference". Then the response contains a serviceListBoundaryReference element: xmlns:slb="TBD" urn:service:sos.ambulance urn:service:sos.fire urn:service:sos.gas urn:service:sos.mountain urn:service:sos.poison urn:service:sos.police 3.2. Retrieving the serviceList Boundary via getServiceListBoundary In order to retrieve the boundary for a specific service list, the client issues a request, similar to the request. An example is shown below: The LoST server response is shown below: Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 6] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 AT Lower Austria The serviceListKey uniquely identifies a serviceListBoundary as the key does for the service boundary (see Section 5.6 in RFC 5222). Therefore the serviceListKey is a random token with at least 128 bits of entropy and can be assumed globally unique. Whenever the boundary changes, a new serviceListKey MUST be assigned. 3.3. Service List Boundary The service list boundary indicates a region within which all queries with the same service identifiers result in the same serviceList. A service list boundary may consist of geometric shapes (both in civic and geodetic location format), and may be non-contiguous, like the service boundary. The mapping of the specific services within the service list boundary may be different at different locations. The server may return the boundary information in multiple profiles, but has to use at least one profile that the client used in the request in order to ensure that the client is able to process the boundary information. TBD: For an attribute in the request could be used to indicate which profile the client understands (e.g. . requests are purely for diagnostic purposes and do not contain location information at all, so no boundary information is reasonable. Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 7] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 3.4. Implementation Considerations The subsections below discuss implementations issues for the LoST server and client for the serviceListBoundary support. 3.4.1. Server Side The calculation of the largest possible area for which the service list stays the same might be a complex task. An alternative would be to return smaller areas that are easier to compute. In such a case some unneeded queries to the LoST server are the consequence, but still the main purpose of the serviceListBoundary is achieved: Never miss a change of available services. So a reasonable trade-off between the effort to generate the boundary information and the saved queries to the LoST server has to be considered. Probably for some countries the county (or disrict, canton, state, ...) borders would be suitable as serviceListBoundary. Some neighbouring counties may have implemented different services while a listServicesByLocation query in other neighbouring counties still results in the same serviceList. So when moving across a county border, it is at least ensured, that every device fetches a new service list from the LoST server. Other countries might have different structures and the generation of the serviceListBoundary might follow other rules as long as it is ensured that a client is able to notice any change in the service list. 3.4.2. Client Side A mobile client that already implements LoST and evaluates the serviceBoundary has almost everything that is needed to make use of the serviceListBoundary. Since the integration into LoST follows the concept of the serviceBoundary (and also makes use of the same location profiles), just the additional serviceListBoundary has to be evaluated. Whenever moving outside a serviceListBoundary, the client must perform a new listServicesByLocation query with the new location information in order to determine a change in available services. 4. Security & Privacy Considerations Security considerations are discussed in [RFC5222]. Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 8] Internet-Draft serviceListBoundary March 2009 5. IANA Considerations TODO. 6. Acknowledgement The author would like to thank Henning Schulzrinne for the discussion on the draft. 7. Normative References [RFC5222] Hardie, T., Newton, A., Schulzrinne, H., and H. Tschofenig, "LoST: A Location-to-Service Translation Protocol", RFC 5222, August 2008. [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. Author's Address Karl Heinz Wolf nic.at GmbH Karlsplatz 1/2/9 Wien A-1010 Austria Phone: +43 1 5056416 37 Email: karlheinz.wolf@nic.at URI: http://www.nic.at/ Wolf Expires September 4, 2009 [Page 9]