Next Gen IPDR

The Internet Protocol Detail Records (IPDR) standard has had a very successful history of design, adoption, and implementation – most significantly within the Cable industry through the efforts of CableLabs. After discovery and discussion work during the past 6 months, the Next Gen IPDR Working Group has identified some maintenance issues and a set of “next gen” requirements that will extend the current value of IPDR and address the needs and opportunities of an “IP Transaction” ecosystem.

With the glut of available bandwidth disappearing due to a variety of new commercial and residential applications and a seemingly endlessly growing library of content, there is significant pressure on the network service providers to keep building capacity and a strong desire by application/content owners to receive proper value for their assets through new distribution channels. There is also the desire by the consumers of these assets to easily locate the application/content that they are interested in, remove the need to be extremely technically savvy to consume it and pay only for value received. This translates to the need for a lightweight and flexible standard protocol to support inter-business usage accounting for the monetization of this wide variety of assets. IPDR was purpose built just for this need.

The cable industry has built a very successful use case for IPDR deployment through the efforts of CableLabs. This is a model that can and should be repeated for other industries with initial interest already coming from the Metro Ethernet Forum and the Broadband Forum. It order to capitalize on the successes of CableLabs and the current interest of the Metro Ethernet Forum and the Broadband Forum, IPDR needs to become active again within the TM Forum, continue to support CableLabs and then market to organizations, businesses and individuals with interests in digital aggregation points whether they be network, data or server based.

The purpose of this project is to baseline and refresh the IPDR technology standard by:

• Consolidating and organizing the current IPDR assets that have been acquired from IPDR.org or generated since its merger into the TM Forum, including organization on the TM Forum website
• Audit those assets for relevance to the current needs of cable and other communications industries and properly disposition them
• Maintain support for CableLabs and the cable industry
• Define a mission, near-term and long-term goals for IPDR in a convergent IP environment
• Address open items from past UDM charter that are still relevant
• Identify new requirements for IPDR to be included in future charters

IPDR - A modern technology for efficient service usage accounting and data aggregation for today and tomorrow.