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Aries RFC 0032: Message Timing

Summary

Explain how timing of agent messages can be communicated and constrained.

Motivation

Many timing considerations influence asynchronous messaging delivery. We need a standard way to talk about them.

Tutorial

This RFC introduces a decorator to communicate about timing of messages. It is compatible with, but independent from, conventions around date and time fields in messages.

Timing attributes of messages can be described with the ~timing decorator. It offers a number of optional subfields:

"~timing": {
  "in_time":  "2019-01-23 18:03:27.123Z",
  "out_time": "2019-01-23 18:03:27.123Z",
  "stale_time": "2019-01-24 18:25Z",
  "expires_time": "2019-01-25 18:25Z",
  "delay_milli": 12345,
  "wait_until_time": "2019-01-24 00:00Z"
}

The meaning of these fields is:

  • in_time: The timestamp when the preceding message in this thread (the one that elicited this message as a response) was received. Or, on a dynamically composed forward message, the timestamp when an upstream relay first received the message it's now asking to be forwarded.
  • out_time: The timestamp when the message was emitted. At least millisecond precision is preferred, though second precision is acceptable.
  • stale_time: Ideally, the decorated message should be processed by the the specified timestamp. After that, the message may become irrelevant or less meaningful than intended. This is a hint only.
  • expires_time: The decorated message should be considered invalid or expired if encountered after the specified timestamp. This is a much stronger claim than the one for stale_time; it says that the receiver should cancel attempts to process it once the deadline is past, because the sender won't stand behind it any longer. While processing of the received message should stop, the thread of the message should be retained as the sender may send an updated/replacement message. In the case that the sender does not follow up, the policy of the receiver agent related to abandoned threads would presumably be used to eventually delete the thread.
  • delay_milli: Wait at least this many milliseconds before processing the message. This may be useful to defeat temporal correlation. It is recommended that agents supporting this field should not honor requests for delays longer than 10 minutes (600,000 milliseconds).
  • wait_until_time: Wait until this time before processing the message.

All information in these fields should be considered best-effort. That is, the sender makes a best effort to communicate accurately, and the receiver makes a best effort to use the information intelligently. In this respect, these values are like timestamps in email headers--they are generally useful, but not expected to be perfect. Receivers are not required to honor them exactly.

An agent may ignore the ~timing decorator entirely or implement the ~timing decorator and silently ignore any of the fields it chooses not to support.

Timing in Routing

Most usage of the ~timing decorator is likely to focus on application-oriented messages processed at the edge. in_time and out_time, for example, are mainly useful so Bob can know how long Alice took to ponder her response to his love letter. In onion routing, where one edge agent prepares all layers of the forward wrapping, it makes no sense to apply them to forward messages. However, if a relay is composing new forward messages dynamically, these fields could be used to measure the delay imposed by that relay. All the other fields have meaning in routing.

Timing and Threads

When a message is a reply, then in_time on an application-focused message is useful. However, out_time and all other fields are meaningful regardless of whether threading is active.

Reference

Implementations

The following lists the implementations (if any) of this RFC. Please do a pull request to add your implementation. If the implementation is open source, include a link to the repo or to the implementation within the repo. Please be consistent in the "Name" field so that a mechanical processing of the RFCs can generate a list of all RFCs supported by an Aries implementation.

Name / Link Implementation Notes
RFC 0193: Coin Flip Protocol Uses ~timing.expires_time to time out each step of the coin flip.