An Address Resolution and Key Exchange Protocol for Conferencing Applications on the Internet

Many multimedia conference initiation and control protocols like the Session Invitation Protocol or ITU-T H.323 are likely to coexist on the Internet. Although these protocols have di erent invitation schemes and di erent addressing mechanisms, they all need transport addresses to send conference calls. Considering users mobility, address redirection mechanisms were built into invitation protocols, but in a way speci c to that particular protocol. The Confman Address Resolution Protocol (ConfARP) is a simple protocol designed to allow address translations from logical addresses to transport addresses independent of the applied conference initiation protocol. Further ConfARP can deliver encryption keys for the conference setup along with the transport addresses to support encrypted conference calls.