A platform for converged, feature-based real-time communications

We propose in this paper a platform enabling advanced real-time communication (RTC) services in a very unified manner. Audio/video RTC is converged with other (not necessarily real-time) information and in-/output from users to create a new, richer communication experiences. More concrete, the proposed platform is capable of tailoring audio/video communication streams to converge their real-time payload with supplemental associated data exchange as images, overlay information, maps or texts. Such converged rich and interactive communication services can be provided either for managed Telecom networks with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) by using the platform as an Application Server, or over the global Internet for browser-based WebRTC User Agents. The platform scales elastically according to different signaling and media processing load requirements. Problems addressed in our work are (1) platform requirements for converging real-tine multi media/protocol communication services and (2) its extensibility and scalability.