Directory Enabled Middleware For Multimedia Communications

Participating Institutions/Organizations:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Application Domain:

Collaborative systems, Directory services, Clickable dialing, Kerberos and authentication, Security

Supporting Networks:

ViDe.Net related networks

End-points/Clients:

SIP, H.323, H.235, H.320 and proprietary protocols

Use:

There has been a growing interest in using the Internet for video teleconferencing, instant messaging, voice over IP, data sharing, and other collaborative activities. Early providers of these services found that they could support dozens of users using informal, manual and marginally secure operational practices. However, as the number of users has grown into the hundreds, thousands, and now millions, providers of these services have looked toward scalable and manageable architectures in order to reliably and securely meet their users’ expectations. This study describes a sample architecture that could be implemented to manage multimedia applications at a university or enterprise and provides a high level overview of the various components and their interrelation.

Typically, a large university or enterprise already has a system in place for identity management. This system is capable of adding new employees, updating their address and telephone number changes over time, managing name changes when people marry, tracking students as they enroll and graduate. The administrator hoping to deliver multimedia communications services must have access to these user management functions in order to effectively provide service. The administrator must therefore either replicate these services, or link into the existing processes. Early experiences with multimedia communications have shown that after deployment reaches a critical size, the cost of manual or redundant identity management quickly becomes the greatest cost associated with delivering the service; greater even than large capital expenditures such as multipoint control units and gateways.

Notes:

For more information, see the full paper at http://www.unc.edu/video/middleware/.

Contact:

Tyler Miller Johnson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, trjohns1@email.unc.edu