Session Control Protocol vs ICE

Ellis S. Cohen (ellis@osf.org)
Tue, 20 Dec 1994 20:22:12 -0500


In your message of Nov 20th about HTTP-NG, you described
SCP, a session control protocol, which supports multiple
conversations over a single TCP connection.

Before standardizing a new protocol in this area, you
may want to take a good look at the ICE protocol and
the ICElib library for it, which is part of X11R6,
and which was released this past summer.

ICE also supports multiple conversations over a single
connection, with support for separate authentication
of each conversation. ICE is designed to be
used over TCP or any other reliable connection-oriented
transport. ICElib is thread-safe and can be used in either
a single or multi-thread environment.

A great deal of design work and testing went into ICE,
both as part of the X Consortium review process, and
as a result of using it to implement the X Session
Management protocol and library.

The best contact for more information is Ralph Mor
at the X Consortium, mor@x.org

-- Ellis