Policy-based distributed management architecture for large-scale enterprise conferencing service using SIP

Recent advances in broadband communication and computing technology have accelerated the proliferation of Internet protocol-based multimedia conferencing services in large-scale enterprises. Most of the research on session initial protocol (SIP)-based multimedia conferencing, however, has been limited in scalability due to the centralized management of conference control by a single server. In order to overcome this limitation, we have designed policy-based distributed management architecture for a large-scale enterprise conferencing service by extending the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF's) approach. The salient feature of the proposed management architecture is that in addition to the distribution of media processing, both participant membership control and authorization functions are dynamically distributed in accordance with the management policy in order to improve scalability. In order to implement these distributed management functions, we have extended both SIP and conference policy control protocols of the IETF. We also show the procedures for the distributed conference management using the extended SIP signaling methods. Finally, we have evaluated by simulation the performances of the proposed architecture in comparison with the centralized architecture of the IETF. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture greatly improves scalability.