Centralized Conferencing BOF (xcon) Tuesday, July 15 at 1700-1800 ============================== CHAIRS: Alan Johnston (alan.johnston@mci.com) Adam Roach (adam@dynamicsoft.com) 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. Partial List of Input Documents - draft-ietf-sipping-conferencing-requirements-00.txt - draft-ietf-sipping-conferencing-framework-00.txt - draft-ietf-sipping-cc-conferencing-01.txt - draft-ietf-sipping-cc-framework-02.txt - draft-ietf-sipping-conference-package-01.txt - 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 Mailing-List: xcon@softarmor.com http://www.softarmor.com/mailman/listinfo/xcon