Handle Resolution Option for ASAP

Introduction Reliable Server Pooling defines protocols for providing highly available services. The Aggregate Server Access Protocol (ASAP) provides session management and server selection for applications. Upon request for a server selection -- denoted as handle resolution -- an ENRP server returns a list of selected PE identities. The number of PE identities to be returned is not specified by RSerPool. Furthermore, the ASAP protocol does not contain a way to let the requesting instance specify it. As shown in , , , selecting too many entries does not make sense for the application, but on the other hand also results in significant processing and network overhead. Furthermore, it has been shown in that the number of requested elements is usually 1, but there are application cases where more PE identities have to be returned. That is, there should be a way to specify the number of requested PE items upon a handle resolution.

Scope The Handle Resolution option defined in this draft simply defines an option to let the PU-side specify the desired number of PE identities from the ENRP server.

Terminology The terms are commonly identified in related work and can be found in the Aggregate Server Access Protocol and Endpoint Handlespace Redundancy Protocol Common Parameters document .

Conventions The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Handle Resolution Option

Definition The Handle Resolution option MAY be used once in an ASAP Handle Resolution message sent from a PU to an ENRP server. It is defined as follows. Items: 32 bits (unsigned integer) Contains the number of PE identities to be selected by the ENRP server. Setting it to 0xffffffff denotes obtaining as many PE identities as possible. A setting of 0 denotes using the ENRP server's default value; this default MUST be used if there is no Handle Resolution option given. The ENRP server SHOULD try to fulfill the request for the given number of items. Note that the high-order bits of the type field are set to 10, which means "skip this parameter and continue processing" if this parameter type is not supported by the ENRP server. This allows for interoperability with old implementations.

Reference Implementation The RSerPool reference implementation RSPLIB can be found at . It supports the functionalities defined by , , , and as well as the options , and the option defined in this document. An introduction to this implementation is provided in .

Testbed Platform A large-scale and realistic Internet testbed platform with support for the multi-homing feature of the underlying SCTP protocol is NorNet. A description of NorNet is provided in and . Further information can be found on the project website .

Security Considerations Security considerations for RSerPool systems are described in .

IANA Considerations This document does not require additional IANA actions beyond those already identified in the ENRP and ASAP protocol specifications.

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Nihad Cosic, Dirk Hoffstadt, Michael Kohnen, Jobin Pulinthanath and Xing Zhou for their support.