A Virtual and Distributed Control Layer with Proximity Awareness for Group Conferencing in P2PSIP

Abstract

There is an increasing demand to access voice or video group conferences without the burden of a dedicated infrastructure, but at any place and in an ad hoc fashion. Corresponding solutions require a lightweight, fully distributed cooperation among parties that share and manage the conference in an efficient, self-adaptive way. The technology framework of P2PSIP can be seen as a promising starting point to meet these objectives. In this paper, we make several contributions towards such a distributed, virtualized control layer based on P2PSIP that seamlessly scales and adapts to the user needs. We propose a P2P-signaling protocol scheme for a distributed conference control with SIP, that splits the semantic of Identifier and Locator of a SIP conference URI in a standard-compliant manner. This protocol scheme serves as further basis for a virtualization in RELOAD. We further design and evaluate a self-organizing communication layer that provides load sharing and churn resilience with proximity-awareness. Finally, we address key aspects of security and trust, as well as compatibility for conference unaware clients.