[Sipping] Centralized Conferencing (xcon) BOF Announcement

[Alan Johnston <[e-mail]>]

FYI.

Centralized Conferencing BOF (xcon)

Tuesday, July 15 at 1700-1800
==============================

CHAIRS: Alan Johnston ([e-mail])
         Adam Roach ([e-mail])

AGENDA:

- Intro and Agenda Bashing (5 min)
- Problem Statement and Overview of Scope (10 min)
- Charter Discussion (15 min)
- Open Discussion (30 min)


Description of Proposed Working Group


The focus of this working group is to develop a standardized suite of 
protocols for tightly-coupled multimedia conferences, where strong security 
and authorization requirements are integral to the solution. 
Tightly-coupled conferences have a central point of control and 
authorization so they can enforce specific media and membership 
relationships, and provide an accurate roster of participants. The media 
mixing or combining function of a tightly-coupled conference need not be 
performed centrally, however. Unlike previous attempts at standardizing 
conferencing-related activities, the scope of this effort is intentionally 
very narrow, and is intended to enable interoperability in a commercial 
environment which already has a number of implementations.


Privacy, security, and authorization mechanisms are integral to the 
solution generated by the working group. This includes allowing 
participants to be completely invisible or to be visible but participate 
anonymously with respect to some or all of the other participants. 
Authorization rules allow for participants and non-participants to have 
roles (ex: speaker, moderator, owner), and to be otherwise authorized to 
perform membership and media manipulation for or on behalf of other 
participants. In order to preserve these properties, the protocols used 
will require implementation of channel security and authentication services.


Initially this combination of protocols will be specified with respect to 
session setup with SIP, but most of the specific components would be 
applicable to conferences setup using other protocols. [None of the 
protocols defined by this group will be SIP or require SIP extensions.] The 
group will use the high-level requirements and framework already described 
by documents published by the SIPPING WG.


The deliverables for the group will be:
- A mechanism for membership and authorization control
- A mechanism to manipulate and describe media "layout" or "topology" for 
multiple media types (audio, video, text)
- A mechanism for notification of conference related events/changes (for 
example a roster)
- A basic floor control protocol
- Peer-to-peer cascading of conferences (one conference is a participant in 
another and vice versa)


The following items are specifically out-of-scope:
- Voting
- Multicast media (due to security concerns)
- Fully distributed conferences
- Loosely-coupled conferences (no central point of control)
- Far-end device control
- Protocol used between the conference controller and the mixer(s)
- Capabilities negotiation of the mixer(s)
- Master-slave cascaded conferences


The working group will coordinate closely with the SIPPING and MMUSIC 
working groups. In addition the working group will cooperate with other 
groups as needed, including SIP, AVT, and the W3C SMIL working groups.
In addition, the working group will consider a number of existing drafts (a 
non-exhaustive list is included below) as input to the working group.


Related documents in other working groups:
- draft-ietf-sipping-conferencing-requirements-00.txt
- draft-ietf-sipping-conferencing-framework-00.txt
- draft-ietf-sipping-cc-conferencing-00.txt
- draft-ietf-sipping-cc-framework-02.txt
- draft-ietf-sipping-conference-package-00.txt

Partial list of input documents:
(All documents available at http://ee.wustl.edu/~alan/xcon/ until they 
appear in the IETF archives.)

- draft-even-xcon-conference-scenarios-00.txt
- draft-koskelainen-xcon-cpcp-reqs-00.txt
- draft-even-xcon-media-policy-requirements-00.txt
- draft-koskelainen-xcon-floor-control-req-00.txt
- draft-koskelainen-xcon-xcap-cpcp-usage-00.txt
- draft-levin-xcon-cpcp-00.txt
- draft-mahy-xcon-media-policy-control-00.txt

Comments on the above drafts are welcome on the xcon mailing list:

Mailing-List:   [e-mail]
                 http://www.softarmor.com/mailman/listinfo/xcon









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