SIP-summit : open source SIP web conferencing tool

Abstract

Subscriber mobility and business communication outsourcing have driven competition among service providers to a fever pitch. To retain the existing subscriber base and expand into new markets, successful service providers are looking for ways to deliver personalized, differentiated, real-time multimedia services, such as collaborative meetings. For this purpose, the Internet and intranets have been used to deliver continuous media, both stored and live, for a number of years. In this case, most of the attention has focused on providing guaranteed quality of service and end-to-end data transport, with every application using its own control protocol./ This thesis describes a web conferencing application developed by me which has the following features. • Video conferencing • Application sharing • Transfer control of sharing applications Although multimedia conferencing and application sharing among geographically dispersed users are increasingly popular, their spread is inhibited by platform dependency problems. Therefore this application is developed using Java as the ,implementation language in order to achieve platform independence. The video conferencing feature provides user the ability to have video/audio conferencing session between host and the participant at any time they need it. I lere the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has been used for inviting participants to multimedia session and other related protocols to control the multimedia conference./ The application sharing module uses the information obtained using SIP to create a connection between the participants which satisfies the need of reliable data transfer. An application can be controlled by a remote machine using the Transfer of Control application/ In this project, video conferencing functionality has been implemented only as a proof of concept. The major implementation was application sharing. Here I have used the screen capturing approach to share applications. This approach provides platform independence as the application shared need not install or run in all participants' machines. With this approach, network resource usage is a major issue; hence I discuss the steps 1 have taken to alleviate that problem. I also discuss solutions for certain key problems found in application sharing like maintaining consistency, late- comers and floor control (Floor control ensures that only one person at a time controls shared applications).