Abstract

Multimedia conferencing applications are an important and widely-used category of Web applications. Floor control is a significant and advanced feature of multimedia conferencing applications. Floor control mechanisms, when introduced in audio/video conferencing, control the media streams such as identifying which participant is allowed to send and who can be seen or heard. This prevents conflict and ensures an optimized use of resources between the conference participants. Floor control is composed of three logical entities: a single floor control server (i.e. entity responsible for managing the floors and their status), one or more floor chairs (moderators), and any number of regular conference participants.
This thesis proposes a SOAP Web services based architecture for floor control in multimedia conferencing. Web services are designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. They are attractive because of their flexibility. There are two types of web services: SOAP Web services and RESTful Web services. In SOAP Web services, interactions between the entities are based on XML and use SOAP, which is embedded in HTTP. RESTful web services are an architectural design style that rely on HTTP, but do not use SOAP. XML is also optional. We propose a set of floor control requirements and use them to review the related work and pinpoint the weaknesses. The proposed architecture includes the main components of floor control. It also includes a comprehensive set of server-side and client-side SOAP web service APIs that expose the floor control capabilities to application developers. The proposed APIs are programming language-independent and provide a higher level of abstraction to the application developers, which enables the interoperability. Furthermore, in the proposed architecture the floor control clients do not interact directly with the floor control server (FCS) but through a gateway accessible using SOAP web services. This opens up the possibility to use different floor control protocols transparently to the floor control clients. Application portability is no longer a problem because floor clients access the floor capabilities independently of the protocol supported by the FCS.
We have built a conferencing application with floor control as a proof of concept to demonstrate the new interface for floor control and the feasibility of the proposed architecture. In addition, performance measurements have also been made to evaluate the viability of the architecture.