DCON / News: Recent posts

The new versions of Internet drafts on distributed conferencing are available.
Please refer to DCON web site for details (http://dcon.sourceforge.net)

A paper on CONFIANCE and DCON has been recently presented at the IPTComm 2007 conference (Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications) in New York. After the discussion of the paper, which described the scalability enhancements DCON can offer, a demo of the described work has been successfully arranged for all the interested attendees.
Please refer to DCON web site for details (http://dcon.sourceforge.net)

An article about DCON has been published on the March issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine.
Please refer to DCON web site for details (http://dcon.sourceforge.net)

If a user belonging to a focus wants to join a conference hosted by a remote focus he/she simply calls the selected conference number as well as if it were a local conference. The centralized focus understands the conference isn't local and triggers the exchange of a set of messages needed to setup an RTP channel (only for audio) between the involved foci and to add the remote user to the conference. From this moment all messages related to natively centralized protocols (e.g. BFCP) are appropriately routed and dispatched through the s2s channel. In such way the management of floors is performed by the FCS on the focus hosting the conference. Media flows instead are locally mixed on each cascaded focus and then sent through the RTP channel to the hosting focus. The hosting focus will mix all its local users' media with the incoming flow from all the cascaded foci, and send them back the final mix.

The Work in Progress version of our platform is available in the project download page, with these new features implemented so far:

* implementation of a new, more flexible, focus discovery and presence manager component;
* support for the new functionality and messages of the Scheduling Protocol;
* remote user invite to a conference;
* implementation of a Dispatcher which is in charge to dialog with the (new created in CONFIANCE) Gateway componet;
* forwarding of Conference Control and BFCP messages to the rigth remote destination by means of an XMPP incapsulation and of a label switching mechanism.... read more

Three Internet-Drafts recently submitted to IETF XCON WG are available in the Drafts section of our web site ( http://dcon.sourceforge.net/ ).

The draft named "Requirements for Distributed Conferencing" examines the requirements for an architecture capable to provide a distributed conferencing service. It draws inspiration from a number of existing research efforts inside the IETF, mainly in the context of both the SIPPING and the XCON WGs.... read more

As a starting point, the stable version of our platform is available in the project download page: please note, however, that, even if stable, this version is OUTDATED (check out the install.txt for the right version of the software to use), since we're putting great efforts in the next version of our platform: check the W.I.P. on the project page as soon as it will be made available.

The components you'll need to increase the potentiality of the CONFIANCE platform are:... read more