Issues Around Support of Multimedia

Christian Huitema huitema at RESEARCH.TELCORDIA.COM
Tue Apr 6 10:55:03 EDT 1999


Tom,

I agree with your analysis of requirements. We need to support multuimedia
conference, yet we should not loose sight that H.320 is only a very small
fraction of the initial market, and that we should not unduly increase the
complexity of an audio only system. I also agree that we have to support
multicast, and that we have to provide for fancy control of (at least
some) conferences.

The architecture we had in mind, as Brian explained, is to have one
context per media.  This brings in the notion of a "context type" -- an
audio bridge, a video bridge, a T.120 bridge all behave somewhat
differently.  In fact, the particular realm of video bridging is prone to
divisions such as "single image", "mosaic", "incrustations", which could
be defined as context level parameters. In fact, a common practice on the
MBONE is to carry several video streams on the same RTP association, using
the SSRC as the stream identifier, and letting individual recipients
select which video is displayed and which one is iconized.

Short of that, conference control does not appear to be a real problem
with the current spec.  The mode parameter allows the MGC to specify the
terminations that "contribute" to the mix (allowed to send) and the ones
that only receive information.  In a video bridge, the contributing
terminations are sent in the mosaic, or multiplexed as RTP streams.  In a
T.120 bridge, the "master" termination is authorized to contribute, the
other one remain passive.  Synchronization of multiple context can be
performed by the MGC: event reporting allows it to detect the last
speaker, or video activity, or T.120 activity, and to issue MODIFY command
that manage the conference accordingly.  If the event/command chain is
deemed to slow, then we will have to resort to a local script, a surrogate
for the MGC.

But there is more.

Support for H.320 requires, in particular, the support for H.221
multiplexing of several streams onto a single carrier.  That support is
somewhat similar to the support of several DS0 inside a single DS1, or
several B-Channels, albeit there are some obvious differences --
multiplexing parameters vary on a call per call basis, or even within a
call.  We have to express the notion that a specific termination, for the
duration of a call, is "exploded" into a set of ephemeral terminations,
each of which is then connected to a media specific context.  This
requires an additional mechanism, something like a 'demultiplexing
context'.

Demultiplexing has a symmetric, inverse multiplexing.  This happens when
an H.320 conference spans several B channels.  It can also happen for data
calls.

In order to at least obtain the "warm and fuzzy feeling" that Fernando
mentions, we have at a minimum to sketch out our solution to inverse
multiplexing and demultiplexing, and maybe to propose one way to handle
H.320.

--
Christian Huitema
------------------------------
Please note my new address: huitema at research.telcordia.com
http://www.telcordia.com/



More information about the sg16-avd mailing list