A Floor Control Protocol For SIP-Based Multimedia Conferences

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to define a protocol to regulate resources among participants in SIP-based centralized multimedia conferences. Centralized conferences are typical of contemporary conferencing architectures. SIP is emerging as the signaling protocol of choice for multimedia multiparty sessions. An important problem that needs to be addressed, in such sessions, is that of controlling and ordering access to multimedia resources among participants. This is also known as floor control. There is, to the best of our knowledge, no standardized protocol that addresses the problem of floor control, though there is one other competing proposal in the pipeline. The work in this thesis proposes a set of primitives that solve the above problem, for a variety of situations. We present a comparison of the approach taken in this thesis and the existing proposal. We have developed software that realizes a subset of the primitives as a preliminary proof of concept of the proposed protocol.