One of the goals of the AS2 Reliability Profile is for AS2 products to achieve a "once and only once" delivery of messages. This feature may be utilized by any industry but the standards work has been undertaken by eCommerce Technology Group (eTG) under GS1. Currently the AS2 protocol defines a unique "Message-ID" but there is not a standard method to prevent the same message (re-transmitted by the initial sender) from reaching back-end business applications at the initial receiver. This is complicated by the number of AS2 software products available with varying capabilities
and varying network service quality.
TCP underpinnings of HTTP over which AS2 operates generally provide a good quality of network connectivity, but experience indicates a need to be able to compensate for transient server and socket exceptions, including "Connection refused" as well as "Server busy." In addition, difficulties with server availability, stability, and loads can result in reduced operational reliability. The AS2 Reliability standard address this area as well by providing guidelines on retry and resend criteria and parameters which AS2 vendors can standardize against.
The AS2 Reliability Profile thus address duplicate message elimination and standardizes mechanisms for retrying and resending AS2 Messages and MDNs which are crucial to reliable operation of production AS2 installations.
AS2 Reliability Draft Specification
Please note that this profile is based on underlying specifications which have been submitted as IETF internet draft versions. Each individual version is valid for six months on the IETF website. Drummond Group Inc. also makes available this draft document for your convenience here:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-duker-as2-reliability-02.txt
AS2 Reliability Testing
Drummond Group will begin testing this profile in a phased approach in the 3Q07 AS2 Interoperability test round. First, the duplicate message elimination will be addressed by first making optional the reuse of the MessageID in resends and retries, then making it required in AS2 1Q08 Interop. Future AS2 Interop's will introduce the standardization of the retry and resend criteria and parameters.
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