Message Multiplexing (memux) Charter
Name | Area |
Chairs
| Directors |
Mailing List
| Description | Goals &
Milestones | Background
Working Group Name
Message Multiplexing (memux)
IETF Area
Transport Area
Chairs
Transport Area Directors
Responsible Area Director
Vern Paxson
Mailing List
The <ietf-memux@w3.org>
mailing list and
archives
are available for discussions of MEMUX. Postings to this mailing list from
non-subscribers are moderated in order to avoid spam, everything else will
be passed as is. See the Mailing list administrativia
for details.
Description of Working Group
The goal of this working group is to standardize a lightweight protocol
that delivers multiplexed bidirectional reliable ordered message streams
over a bidirectional reliable ordered byte stream protocol (such as TCP).
This is envisioned as a relatively low-level piece of other protocol stacks,
fitting between, e.g., TCP and RPC. The length of a message is unrestricted
(e.g., not bounded by layer 2 or 3 packet sizes), and the payload of a
message is also unrestricted; such a message can be used directly, e.g.,
as a request or a response in an application-level request/response protocol.
Within each message stream, the messages are delivered reliably and in
order (as are bytes in TCP). Each message may be passed as a series
of chunks, so that the multiplexing does not introduce unnecessary synchronization
between streams. The MEMUX protocol will be layered on top of bidirectional
reliable ordered byte stream protocols, and multiplex many message streams
over a single byte stream connection. The MEMUX protocol will be
lightweight in these two ways: (1) its overhead, in bytes on the wire,
will be low, and (2) opening and closing new message streams, once the
byte stream connection is established, will take few bytes and impose no
round-trip delays. The value of the MEMUX protocol is twofold: (1)
it provides a commonly useful service abstraction (bidirectional reliable
ordered arbitrary-sized message stream), and (2) the multiplexing achieves
the same results as state sharing between parallel TCP streams (which is
not widely available today). The second value may cease to be unique
in the future (when TCP and/or replacements that effectively share state
between parallel connections become widely available), but having built
other protocols and implementations on top of the service provided by MEMUX
enables a smooth transition to a MEMUX-- that delivers the same service
while doing no multiplexing of its own.
Goals and Milestones
-
1999/03 - WG chartered
-
1999/09 - MEMUX specification submitted to IESG for publication as Proposed
Standard
Background Information
Interest in a multiplexing protocol appeared at IETF-43 in the HTTPNG,
RUTS, SIGTRAN, MEGACO, and AAA meetings. The HTTP-NG
proponents submitted a draft multiplexing protocol (draft-gettys-webmux-00.txt)
on 1 August 1998 as part of the HTTP-NG suite.