■■ Scaling from point-to-point voice calls to conferences and network
broadcasts encompassing millions of users
■■ Empowering end users to choose both applications and content on a
global basis
■■ Revolutionizing the software industry by forcing the redevelopment of
practically all software applications so that they are Internet-centric and
the providing of software such as office productivity applications that
are communication-aware (as is the case for the Microsoft Office suite)
For any type of communications and media, these features of the Internet
are leading to a migration to the Internet of both the telecommunication ser-
vices (such as telephony) and broadcast services (such as TV and radio). We
share the belief found in the Internet community that the Internet will lead to
services and social structures that do not exist today, similar to e-commerce
that has emerged with profound implications for all commerce.
Such an impact, however, does not come without a price, and as is very
appropriate for the Internet, the price is not primarily in a new physical infra-
structure (huge in itself by any measure) but in what we believe to be a large
and ever-expanding mandatory knowledge base and skill sets.
We provide here a short overview of the main protocols required for Inter-
net multimedia and conferencing.
An overview of the Internet protocol stack for multimedia [1] is shown in
Figure 5.1.Figure 5.1 Internet multimedia protocol stackCONFERENCE MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS MEDIA AGENTS
CONFERENCE CONTROL AUDIO/VIDEO APPLICATIONSSHAREDINTEGRATED SERVICES FORWARDINGIP and IP MULTICAST NETWORK LAYERCONFERENCE SETUP AND DISCOVERY
SDP
SAP
UDP UDPRSVP DISTRIBUTEDCONTROL RTP/RTCP MULTICASTRELIABLETCPSIP HTTP SMTP82 Chapter 5