The EMMA multimedia conference service

The complexity and diversity of novel telecommunication services require experimental systems for the exploration of research areas such as resource allocation and management. The aim of the paper is to introduce a multimedia conferencing service and to summarize its main benefits. This service is based on an experimental system, which deals with research issues both on the network and terminal side and which is adequate for quantitative and subjective evaluation of teleservices. An object-oriented model describes the parties involved in the session, the allocated network and terminal resources and the media used for communication. The objects of this model are created and updated by a high level service management protocol. The centralized resource management scheme ensures QoS for any kind of multimedia service. Another benefit of this system is that the control of the service can be done by naive users.