A Novel Architecture for Floor Control in the IP Multimedia Subsystem of 3G Networks

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a key component of 3G networks. It enables the seamless provision of multimedia services to end-users. Multimedia conferencing is an important category of multimedia services in IMS. It is the basis of a wide range of multiparty applications including audio/video conferencing, multiparty gaming and distance learning. Floor control is an important feature of multimedia conferencing. It manages the access to shared resources such as audio and video channels. This paper proposes a novel architecture for floor control in IMS. The architecture is an add-on to the IMS conferencing architecture. It includes a comprehensive set of server side and client side API that exposes the floor control capabilities to application developers. It enables the use of emerging industry standards such as SIP MSCML and JSR 309. Furthermore it proposes a novel interface (the SIP Floor Server Control Mark Up (SIP-FSCML) Language) as an alternative to Megaco/H.248 for controlling floor control servers. We successively introduce the overall architecture, the novel APIs, the communication interfaces (including SIP-FSCML) and the proof of concept prototype.