Service oriented architecture for VoIP conferencing

Wenjun Wu, Geoffrey Fox, Hasan Bulut, Ahmet Uyar, Tao Huang
2006 International Journal of Communication Systems  
Voice/Video over IP (VoIP) systems to date have been either highly centralized or dependent on the IP multicast in nature. Global Multimedia Collaboration System is a scalable, integrated and service-oriented VoIP conferencing system, based on the XGSP collaboration framework and NaradaBrokering messaging middleware. This system can provide media and session services to heterogeneous endpoints such as H.323, SIP, Access Grid, RealPlayer as well as cellular phone. In this paper, we address the
more » ... allenges of scalability, interoperablity and heterogeneity in massive VoIP conferencing system. We believe that our approach opens up new opportunities for leveraging classic VoIP systems by using new technologies in service-oriented computing. Introduction VoIP and videoconferencing systems are increasingly becoming a very important and popular application on the Internet. There are various solutions to such multimedia communication applications, among which H.323 [1], SIP [2], and Access Grid [3] are well-known. It will bring substantial benefits to Internet users if we can build an integrated collaboration environment, which combines these systems into a single easy-to-use, intuitive environment. These emerging advanced distributed multimedia services demand a scalable, robust and adaptive service infrastructure. However, both the traditional telecommunication architecture based on client/server model and multicast based Internet model can't naturally offer such a platform. Currently, service-oriented architecture is regarded as a promising solution to Internet applications such as peer-to-peer computing, Grid and Web-Services computing. It suggests a powerful vision for the future VoIP and videoconferencing systems. We propose a service-oriented VoIP conferencing framework which can interoperate with standardsbased VoIP systems to forge an open software solution that will leverage existing conferencing resources. XGSP (XML based General Session Protocol) [4] is an interoperable framework based on Web services technology for creating and controlling audio and videoconferences. Just like the text messages in SIP, XML should be used to describe the XGSP protocol because it makes the protocol easier to be understood and to interact with other Web based components. Based on this framework, Global-MMCS (Global Multimedia Collaboration System) [5] is developed to support scalable web-service based interoperable VoIP conferences and integrate various services including videoconferencing, instant messaging and streaming. Global-MMCS uses a unified, scalable, QoS aware "overlay" network -NaradaBrokering [6], to support audiovisual and data group communication over heterogeneous networking environments. Using XGSP schema, Global-MMCS specifies a distributed flexible conference management mechanism for integration of various VoIP conferencing services, and a common audiovisual signaling protocol for interactions between different conferencing endpoints. Instead of following the telecommunication monolithic service provision which usually mixes the packet delivery, call control functions and service logic intelligence in the central hardware boxes, it separates the MCU/Softswitch in VoIP into distinct services for media delivery, media processing and session management. These services can be distributed and if needed replicated for performance and fault tolerance. On top of the messaging and VoIP media services infrastructure, rich multimedia collaborations can be built to meet the demands in different application scenarios. Also several Gateway services are developed to enable multimedia clients to interact with the core services. The paper is organized in the following way. Section 2 introduces related work and our design principles. System architecture is discussed in Section 3. Section 4 presents the implementation of the system and performance evaluation. Section 5 gives the conclusion and points out the future work.
doi:10.1002/dac.803 fatcat:gew2bxehiba5vl3s5p4cmtkb5e