when the session has ended. In this situation, the call stateful proxy will retain state for the call andDonovan & Rosenberg Standards Track [Page 2] RFC 4028 Session Timer April 2005 has no method to determine when the call state information no longer applies. To resolve this problem, this extension defines a keepalive mechanism for SIP sessions. UAs send periodic re-INVITE or UPDATE [3] requests (referred to as session refresh requests) to keep the session alive. The interval for the session refresh requests is determined through a negotiation mechanism defined here. If a session refresh request is not received before the interval passes, the session is considered terminated. Both UAs are supposed to send a BYE, and call stateful proxies can remove any state for the call. This refresh mechanism has additional applications. A user agent would like to determine whether the session is still active for the same reasons a call stateful proxy server would. This determination can be made at a user agent without the use of SIP level mechanisms; for audio sessions, periodic RTCP packets serve as an indication of liveness [5]. However, it is desirable to separate indications of SIP session liveness from the details of the particular session. Another application of the session timer is in the construction of a SIP Network Address Translator (NAT) Application Level Gateway (ALG) [6]. The ALG embedded in a NAT will need to maintain state for the duration of a call. This state must eventually be removed. Relying on a BYE to trigger the removal of state, besides being unreliable, introduces a potential denial of service attack. This document provides an extension to SIP that defines a session expiration mechanism. Periodic refreshes, through re-INVITEs or UPDATEs, are used to keep the session active. The extension is sufficiently backward compatible with SIP that it works as long as either one of the two participants in a dialog understands the extension. Two new header fields (Session-Expires and Min-SE) and a new response code (422) are defined. Session-Expires conveys the duration of the session, and Min-SE conveys the minimum allowed value for the session expiration. The 422 response code indicates that the session timer duration was too small.2. Terminology In this document, the key words 'MUST', 'MUST NOT', 'REQUIRED', 'SHALL', 'SHALL NOT', 'SHOULD', 'SHOULD NOT', 'RECOMMENDED', 'MAY', and 'OPTIONAL' are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [1] and indicate requirement levels for compliant SIP implementations.Donovan & Rosenberg Standards Track [Page 3] RFC 4028 Session Timer April 2005 Additionally, we define the following terms: Session Interval: The maximum amount of time that can occur between session refresh requests in a dialog before the session will be considered timed out. The session interval is conveyed in the Session-Expires header field, which is defined here. The UAS obtains this value from the Session-Expires header field in a 2xx response to a session refresh request that it sends. Proxies and UACs determine this value from the Session-Expires header field in a 2xx response to a session refresh request that they receive. Minimum Timer: Because of the