NTRULO: A Tunneling Architecture for Multimedia Conferencing over IP

Abstract

In this paper we present a tunneling solution for multimedia conferencing in Next Generation Networks (NGNs). In particular, we focus on the problems restrictive Firewalls, Proxies and Network Address Translation entities may introduce in multimedia sessions over the Internet, and the need for HTTP-based tunneling when the standard conferencing protocols fail to travel across the network.

The paper describes the client-server architecture we devised to achieve an HTTP-based tunneling of the several protocols involved in multimedia conferencing, explaining advantages and drawbacks of the proposed solution. Furthermore, we describe the additional efforts we needed to devote to the standard HTTP tunneling approach in order to let conferencing-related protocols work with it. Finally we exploit our standard XCON-compliant Meetecho conferencing platform as a complete implementation of our proposal, presenting the reader with some experimental results.