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Standard multimedia conferencing in the wild: the Meetecho architecture

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Abstract

We present a conferencing architecture called Meetecho. To the purpose, we embrace an engineering approach, by describing an actual implementation of an open source centralized video-conferencing system capable to offer advanced communication experience to end-users through the effective exploitation of mechanisms like session management and floor control. Meetecho has been designed to be fully compliant with the latest standard proposals coming from both the IETF and the 3GPP and can be considered as an outstanding example of a real-time application built on top of the grounds paved by the SIP protocol. We will discuss both the design of the overall conferencing framework and the most important issues we had to face during the implementation phase.

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Notes

  1. A focus is a logical entity that maintains the call signaling interface with each participating client and the conference object. As such, the focus acts as an endpoint for each of the supported signaling protocols and is responsible for all primary conference membership operations (e.g., join, leave, update the conference instance) and for media negotiation/maintenance between a conference participant and the focus.

  2. See http://www.asterisk.org

  3. See http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/

  4. See http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/

  5. See http://www.mjsip.org

  6. See http://jsummit.sourceforge.net

  7. See http://jrdesktop.sourceforge.net/

References

  1. 3GPP2 (2007) Conferencing using the IP Multimedia (IM) Core Network (CN) subsystem; Version 1.0). Technical report, 3GPP

  2. Amirante A, Castaldi T, Miniero L, Romano SP (2007) Improving the scalability of an IMS-compliant conferencing framework through presence and event notification. In: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on principles, systems and applications of IP Telecommunications (IPTComm), New York City, NY, USA

  3. Amirante A, Castaldi T, Miniero L, Romano, SP (2008) Improving the scalability of an IMS-compliant conferencing framework Part II: involving mixing and floor control. In: Lecture notes in computer science—IPTComm 2008, pp 174–195

  4. Amirante A, Castaldi T, Miniero L, Romano SP (2010) Recording and playout of multimedia conferencing sessions: a standard approach. In: Lecture notes in computer science—Future Multimedia Networking (FMN) 2010. Springer, pp 63–74

  5. Barnes M, Boulton C, Levin O (2008) A framework for centralized conferencing. RFC5239

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  7. Barnes M, Miniero L, Presta R, Romano SP, Schulzrinne, H (2010) CCMP: a novel standard protocol for conference management in the XCON framework. In: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on principles, systems and applications of IP Telecommunications (IPTComm), Munich, Germany

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Acknowledgement

The Meetecho project is supported by Telecom Italia within the Working Capital initiative.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Meetecho S.r.l., Via C. Poerio 89/a, 80121, Napoli, Italy

    Alessandro Amirante, Tobia Castaldi & Lorenzo Miniero

  2. University of Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio, 21, 80125, Napoli, Italy

    Roberta Presta & Simon Pietro Romano

Authors
  1. Alessandro Amirante
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  2. Tobia Castaldi
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  3. Lorenzo Miniero
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  4. Roberta Presta
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  5. Simon Pietro Romano
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alessandro Amirante.

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Amirante, A., Castaldi, T., Miniero, L. et al. Standard multimedia conferencing in the wild: the Meetecho architecture. Multimed Tools Appl 61, 703–720 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-011-0876-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-011-0876-0

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