Session and media signalling for communication components‐based open multimedia conferencing Web service over IP networks

Service-oriented communication is a new trend in the industry to enable communication through a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and thereby package communications as services, which opens a new paradigm of Web service-based Voice Over Internet Protocol communication, which is extensible and can be easily integrated in end-to-end SOA solutions. In this paper, we proposed the communication components-based open multimedia conferencing Web service over IP networks and mainly focus on the session and media signalling for multimedia conferencing Web service. Details including the multimedia conferencing multiple parties call control state machines and session management, the state life cycle management, and the signal flows for multimedia conferencing scenarios, also including the Simple Object Access Protocol messages mapping to the asynchronous events. The session and media signalling management also provides the Web services interfaces for triggering conferencing session establishment and is further responsible for all necessary media signalling towards a proper media server. In addition, a prototype has been implemented, and its performance has been measured and analysed. Finally, we give the conclusions and future work. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.