WARNING: This document has been automatically Deferred after 12 months of inactivity in its previous Experimental state. Implementation of the protocol described herein is not recommended for production systems. However, exploratory implementations are encouraged to resume the standards process.
The Jingle (XEP-0166) [1] extensions to XMPP provide a technology for setup, management, and teardown of multimedia sessions between two entities, with an initial focus on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). By design, Jingle has been kept relatively simple and it does not cover the kind of advanced features that are available on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and traditional private branch exchange (PBX) systems. However, because Jingle and XMPP itself provide an extensible technology for the real-time exchange of XML data, more advanced use cases can be defined through additional extensions. This document specifies one such extension, for the transfer of a session from one entity to another entity using either attended transfer or unattended transfer (for the difference between these scenarios, see for example RFC 5359 [2]). Although this extension will likely be used mainly in the context of VoIP interactions, it could also be used for any Jingle application type, such as video chat or screen sharing.
The session flow for negotiating an unattended transfer is as follows:
The protocol flow is shown below, where the caller is "caller@example.net", the attendant is "attendant@office.example.com", and the callee is "boss@execs.example.com".
First the caller initiates a normal call to the attendant.
The attendant's phone then acknowledges the session request.
Next the attendant answers the call.
The caller acknowledges the session-accept.
Now the attendant decides to transfer the call. It does this by sending a Jingle action of type session-info to the caller, specifying the address of the callee via a <transfer/> element qualified by the "urn:xmpp:jingle:transfer:0" namespace (see Namespace Versioning regarding the possibility of incrementing the version number).
If the caller understands the transfer request, it acknowledges the request (if not, it MUST return a <feature-not-implemented/> error as specified in XEP-0166).
Now the caller puts the attendant on hold.
While the attendant is on hold, the caller initiates a new call to the callee. The session-initiation request includes a <transfer/> element that specifies the attendant's address.
The callee acknowledges the call.
Now the caller's phone detects the successful transfer, so it hangs up on the attendant:
The session flow for negotiating an attended transfer is as follows:
The protocol flow is shown below, where the caller is "caller@example.net", the attendant is "attendant@office.example.com", and the callee is "boss@execs.example.com".
First the caller initiates a normal call to the attendant.
The attendant's phone then acknowledges the session request.
Next the attendant answers the call.
The caller acknowledges the session-accept.
Next the attendant makes a call to the callee for the purpose of completing an attended transfer. Before doing so, the attendant SHOULD verify that the callee supports Jingle session transfer, as described under Determining Support.
The callee acknowledges the session-initiate.
Now the attendant transfers the call by sending a session-info action to the caller containing details about the attendant's session with the callee.
If the caller understands the transfer request, it acknowledges the request (if not, it MUST return a <feature-not-implemented/> error as specified in XEP-0166).
Now the caller puts the attendant on hold.
While the attendant is on hold, the caller initiates a new call to the callee. The session-initiation request includes a <transfer/> element that specifies the attendant's address and the SessionID of the attendant's session with the callee.
The callee identifies an active session with the same from+to+sid and replaces that with the incoming call, so it hangs up on the existing session with the attendant.
The callee then acknowledges the session request from the caller.
Now the caller's phone detects the successful transfer, so it hangs up on the attendant:
If an entity supports session transfers, it MUST advertise that fact by returning a feature of "urn:xmpp:jingle:transfer:0" (see Namespace Versioning regarding the possibility of incrementing the version number) in response to Service Discovery (XEP-0030) [3] information requests.
In order for an application to determine whether an entity supports this protocol, where possible it SHOULD use the dynamic, presence-based profile of service discovery defined in Entity Capabilities (XEP-0115) [4]. However, if an application has not received entity capabilities information from an entity, it SHOULD use explicit service discovery instead.
In unattended transfer, the callee has no way to verify that the attendant specified in the session-initiate request received from the caller was actually involved in the transaction. This implies that:
A malicious caller could attribute its session-initiate request to an attendant, thus discrediting the attendant in the eyes of the callee.
A malicious attendant (or malicious code that has infected an attendant's legitimate client) could "transfer" all session requests it receives to the callee and disavow any responsibility.
If the protocol defined in this specification undergoes a revision that is not fully backwards-compatible with an older version, the XMPP Registrar shall increment the protocol version number found at the end of the XML namespaces defined herein, as described in Section 4 of XEP-0053.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this specification (the "Specification"), to make use of the Specification without restriction, including without limitation the rights to implement the Specification in a software program, deploy the Specification in a network service, and copy, modify, merge, publish, translate, distribute, sublicense, or sell copies of the Specification, and to permit persons to whom the Specification is furnished to do so, subject to the condition that the foregoing copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Specification. Unless separate permission is granted, modified works that are redistributed shall not contain misleading information regarding the authors, title, number, or publisher of the Specification, and shall not claim endorsement of the modified works by the authors, any organization or project to which the authors belong, or the XMPP Standards Foundation.
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## NOTE WELL: This Specification is provided on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. ##
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In no event and under no legal theory, whether in tort (including negligence), contract, or otherwise, unless required by applicable law (such as deliberate and grossly negligent acts) or agreed to in writing, shall the XMPP Standards Foundation or any author of this Specification be liable for damages, including any direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any character arising from, out of, or in connection with the Specification or the implementation, deployment, or other use of the Specification (including but not limited to damages for loss of goodwill, work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all other commercial damages or losses), even if the XMPP Standards Foundation or such author has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
IPR Conformance
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The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is defined in the XMPP Core (RFC 6120) and XMPP IM (RFC 6121) specifications contributed by the XMPP Standards Foundation to the Internet Standards Process, which is managed by the Internet Engineering Task Force in accordance with RFC 2026. Any protocol defined in this document has been developed outside the Internet Standards Process and is to be understood as an extension to XMPP rather than as an evolution, development, or modification of XMPP itself.
The following requirements keywords as used in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119: "MUST", "SHALL", "REQUIRED"; "MUST NOT", "SHALL NOT"; "SHOULD", "RECOMMENDED"; "SHOULD NOT", "NOT RECOMMENDED"; "MAY", "OPTIONAL".
5. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the central coordinator for the assignment of unique parameter values for Internet protocols, such as port numbers and URI schemes. For further information, see <http://www.iana.org/>.
6. The XMPP Registrar maintains a list of reserved protocol namespaces as well as registries of parameters used in the context of XMPP extension protocols approved by the XMPP Standards Foundation. For further information, see <https://xmpp.org/registrar/>.