Beacon in AG 2.0

[Ivan R. Judson]

Hey Mitch,

I chatted with you a bit at SC02 about the beacon, some ideas we have and
our plans for AG 2.0. This email is hopefully going to kick start a
discussion that ends in us finding a way to incorporate some version of the
beacon in the AG 2.0 software release.  This is prompted by the fact that
we're going to alpha next week and we have promised beacon like
functionality as a 'core' part of AG2.0. It's my fault this has taken so
long to get to you, sorry about that.

Anyhow, what we're thinking we'd like to see for a "monitor" (you'll see why
I'm using this name instead of beacon in a minute, I hope):

- a peer to peer service (ie no centralized server)
	We think the way to replicate the current functionality would be to
have each beacon peer connect to all other beacon peers forming a full TCP
mesh.  This sounds crazy if you're considering the beacon the way it's used
now; but we're talking about moving to a model where you only monitor the
connectivity among the users in the same virtual venue, which scopes this
mesh to a reasonable size, for now :).

- the ability to give it a set of addresses to monitor
	We want to monitor connectivity on all media layers, plus the
traditional beacon layer for "base" connectivity. This gives us a richer set
of information about connectivity.

- RTCP monitoring, data over RTP
	This would make the monitor traffic look like any other media stream
to the AG, which would make it more integrated (we could actually record and
playback beacon data from our voyager server :-).

- the ability to log this data locally.

If you have any questions or thoughts feel free to drop me/us email. I'd
love to hear back from you so we can figure out how to move ahead.

Hope things are going well with you,

--Ivan