(A) conference control model for light-weight sessions

Abstract

The current model for light-weight multicast session based teleconferencing applications provide a very primitive set of control mechanisms such as net mutes mic and mic mutes net. Commercial products based on T.124 Recommendation of International Telecommunication Union(ITU) are being introduced, and it seems likely that a similar one based on T.124 will be derived for Internet usage. However, the current emphasis on wide area scalable multicast based conferencing in the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) is desirable, and we shouldn``t sacrifice the benefits of multicast based sessions to conform to the tightly coupled model of T.124 Recommendation. This paper proposes a conference control model for light-weight sessions where media applications can collaborate with a coordination tool to provide a level of control over the light-weight sessions. This coordination tool provides a generic base to manage conferencing states, find agreements among the participants upon which a varying range of policies could be implemented without any changes to each applications. A prototype of the coordination tool has been built and is being used to provide conference control to existing applications.