Multimedia conferencing in the Etherphone environment

Conferencing and collaborative computing

“…Another fundamental distinction is local face-to-face computer-augmented meetings (Mantei 1988;Nunamaker et al 1991;Stefik et al 1987b), versus remote meetings for which a real-time voice and/or video channel is required (Casner and Deering 1992;Chen et al 1992;Craighill et al 1993;Crowley et al 1990; Vin et al 1991). These live media can be carried in digital (Casner and Deering 1992;Elliott 1993) or analog (Ahuja et al 1988; Arango et al 1992;Root 1988) form.…”

“…When groupware applications are used by geographically distributed individuals, a voice channel substitutes for face-to-face speech. Typically, audio is supplied either by conventional telephone conference calls, or packetbased networks (Elliott 1993;Schooler 1993b;Vin et al 1991).…”

“…Increasingly, there have been efforts to develop abstractions to model synchronous conferencing systems (Chang and Whaley 1992;Chen et al 1992; Garcia-Luna-Aceves 1988; Rangan and Vin 1991; Roseman and Greenberg 1992; Schooler 1993a; Vin et al 1991). These models serve a variety of purposes.…”

Networking Foundations for Collaborative Computing at Internet Scope

“…We denote the outmost "root" session as level-0 session. Many conference scenarios contain only two sublevels, subsessions with Ä ½ and coteries with Ä ¾. Coteries permit private subgrouping for brief exchanges ("sidechats") [36] without requiring its members to leave the larger group context or open a separate multicast group. Neilsen and Mizuno describe a membership algorithm for joining and leaving coteries [21], and Texier and Plouzeau [32] propose object binding algorithms for multiple sessions, however, to date a sound mechanism for session management in multimedia collaboration is still missing.…”

Predictable communication protocol processing in real-time Mach

“…It is in many ways similar to traditional teleconferencing applications (for example, PictureTel, "CU/see-me" on the Mac, [3,16]) but it is also quite different in many other ways. For example, a distinct user-level audio server process hides the details of the system's sound card by providing a higher level interface similar to the AudioFile utility.…”