May 20, 2010

RFC 3588 vs 3588bis, what will the market adopt

RFC 3588, the Diameter base protocol RFC was officially introduced in 2003 by the IETF.
Over the last couple of years there was a lot of work done to introduce a new Diameter base, this was led by people like Glen Zorn and Victor Fajardo, was named RFC 3588bis.
RFC 3588bis is set to replace the original RFC 3588 with fixes to some of the Diameter base issues, mainly in the areas of session, security (TLS) and some improvements and clean up (IPSec..)
I have a few concerns how It will affect the adoption of Diameter, which is today mainly in the telecom field (and not the Internet)
There are a few questions that come to mind (and my own personal bet)
- Will the market move to RFC 3588 bis? (yes, the big question is in what rate)
- Will it create interoperability issues ? (yes of course)
- Will it create confusion ? (you bet)
- Will it help to establish Diameter position as the AAA/Control protocol of the next decade ? (maybe)
- Is it needed ? (I prefer not to answer this one  )

One thing for sure it’s going to be interesting in the Diameter scene, with continuing adoption, growing amount of Diameter signaling, Diameter spreading out of the mobile core to the wireline, booming amount of Diameter interfaces, LTE (which should be renamed to Diameter TE due to the amount of Diameter signaling there) and of course new Diameter base.