Reasons for the question

• There is a continuing need to maintain and, where necessary, enhance existing common transport protocols to meet new service requirements, uphold network performance and integrity and to correct errors or to remove ambiguities in protocol descriptions.
• There may also be a need for the development of new protocols to provide transport services that are beyond the capabilities of existing common transport protocols and that are needed for the transfer of control plane information associated with the support of new services.
• There is a need to evaluate common transport protocols developed or under development in the Internet Engineering Task Force and other external standards development organizations with respect to their capability to support requirements identified in studies performed under the terms of reference of the requirements/coordination and application level protocol questions.

Question

What new recommendations and enhancements to existing recommendations are required to describe common transport protocols aimed at supporting the transfer of control plane information generated by service specific application level protocols?

Task objectives

1) Provide management functions for transport protocols in order to maintain and enhance network integrity and performance.

Estimated completion: Ongoing.

2) Maintain existing transport protocols, where necessary, to correct errors and remove ambiguities.

Estimated completion: Ongoing.

3) Administer code point allocations in the Message Transfer Part, the Signalling Connection Control Part, the Signalling ATM Adaptation Layer, and the ISDN User-Network Interface Data Link Layer protocols.

Estimated completion: NOTE.

4) Administer the introduction of new Translators in the Signalling Connection Control Part protocol.

Estimated completion: NOTE.

5) Enhance existing protocols or develop new protocols in response to requirements that are identified in the studies performed under the terms of reference of the requirements/coordination and application level protocol questions or result from studies done in other ITU Study Groups.

Estimated completion: NOTE.

6) Evaluate and if appropriate make use of protocols developed by external standards development organizations to meet the requirements arising from the studies performed under the terms of reference of the requirements/coordination and application level protocol questions.

Estimated completion: NOTE.

7) Assisted, if necessary, by experts involved in the study of Question 14/11 provide the information required to generate Protocol Implementation Conformance Statements (PICS) for new transport protocols.

NOTE - Completion date(s) for this activity are in accordance with applicable completion dates set for task objectives in Questions on signalling requirements and protocols.

Relationships

The tasks associated with this question are the result of requirements established by work performed under the terms of reference of the requirements/coordination and application level protocol questions. Relationships may also exist with other Study Groups where network performance and integrity are discussed. Task Objective 6) furthermore requires the establishment and maintenance of relationships with external standards development organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force.