Managing Shared Ephemeral Teleconferencing State: Policy and Mechanism

In recent years there has been dramatic progress on the enabling technologies for workstationbased multimedia teleconferencing applications. We expect that such applications will soon become an important component of many future social and business interactions. Teleconferencing applications have aspects of their state, such as membership, types of media beings used, and encryption, that are under joint control. Much of this state is ephemeral, in that it is of importance only for the duration of a session, and does not have importance outside of the session itself. In this paper we focus on the specification and realization of policies for managing this shared ephemeral teleconferencing state. We first define a broad family of policies which has three dimensions: initiation, voting and consistency. We then consider three different communication models, and for each model present a mechanism which implements this family of policies. This specification is a product of the Multiparty Multimedia Session Control working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force. Comments are solicited and should be addressed to the working group’s mailing list at [email protected] and/or the authors. INTERNET-DRAFT draft-ietf-mmusic-agree-00.ps July 6, 1995