Distributable, scalable, pluggable conferencing architecture

摘要

Architecture for a scalable, pluggable multi-party, and distributed multimedia conferencing. A centralized policy and control conferencing component allows the seamless plug-in of different distributed media components (e.g., data, audio/video, messaging) to accommodate client participation in a conference session. The centralized conference control component includes the following: a conference notification service for accepting subscriptions to the conference state and notifying subscribers about changes to that state; a conference policy and roster control service for storing and manipulating conference policy and rosters; a security service for user authorization/authentication based on user identity information; a scheduling service for conference scheduling; an allocation service for allocating the most available media component(s) for a conference session; and, an MCU management service for conference policy and roster management of the distributed media components.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented conferencing system, comprising:
a storage device that stores instructions; and a processing unit that accesses and executes the instructions, execution of the instructions by the processing unit causing the conferencing system to provide a conference control component in response to a conference set-up request submitted by a client, the conference control component configured to:
receive the conference set-up request from the client to create a conference session;after receiving the request to create the conference session, allocate to the conference session a distributed media component that provides media of the conference session to the client;return a uniform resource identifier of the distributed media component to the client after the conference control component allocates the distributed media component to the conference session;receive individual state information for each distributed media component from a set of distributed media components that are allocated for the conference session, wherein the state information comprises, at least, policy information associated with the distributed media component;generating aggregated state information by aggregating the individual state information for each of the distributed media component from the set of distributed media components allocated for the conference session; anddistribute the aggregated state information to each client of the conference session.