Abstract

The Presence Protocol is designed to maintain presence information about a potentially large number of online users connected through various Points of Presence (PoPs), and belonging to several Federations (which are collections of uniformly administered entities). The Presence Protocol meets several of the requirements for a Presence Information Protocol [PIP-Req] in a simple, direct fashion. (Issues around security of messages are deliberately excluded from this draft.) The Presence Protocol is related to the [PIP-Demo] protocol. It differs from it in introducing a notion of Points of Presence, mediating between the Presence Server and user agents (clients) and specifys a mechanism for a user to control the dissemination of their own presence information. It is substantially simpler, doing away with leases (in favor of pings), eliminating redirections, and eliminating the dependence on an HTTP-style transport protocol. Further, it leaves for a separate protocol, the Messaging Protocol, the task of defining how Instant Messages should be communicated between points of presence.

Authors

Chris W. Apple
Vijay Saraswat
Jim Malcolm

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)