The Global-MMCS Project tries to build a collaboration system, which  integrates various services including videoconference, instant messaging and streaming, support multiple videoconferencing technologies and heterogeneous collaboration environments.

Research Scopes

Collaboration systems enable people in remote places to communicate and cooperate together.  It will bring substantial benefits to Internet users if we can build an integrated collaboration environment, which combines conferencing, streaming, instant messaging as well as other collaborations into a single easy-to-use, intuitive environment. However, traditional collaboration system can only provides limited collaboration capabilities to a small group people in a local or private community. They have features that sometimes can be compared but often the systems make implicit architecture and implementation assumptions that hamper interoperability and functionality. Therefore it is very important to create a more general framework to cover the wide range of collaboration solutions and allow different users from the different communities to collaborate.  Since XML and Web Service provide the very powerful capability for meta-data and consturcting hetegenous distributed sytems, it is a very promising solution to build a general collaboration framework based on XML and Web Service technology.

To build an integrated large-scale multimedia collaboration system over heterogeneous network environments, we have to design a scalable computing architecture and flexible software framework. The Messaging event services provide publish-subscribe paradigm for all kinds of group communications in collaboration applications. And it is implemented in a distributed messaging broker middleware, which helps to ensure QoS requirements of various collaboration applications over diverse network environments. The Collaboration Web services framework defines a general architecture, which can integrate all the possible collaboration services, for example videoconferencing, streaming, IM as well as shared applications. On top of these services, all the services can be described, implemented and deployed.

XGSP defines web services framework in which H.323, SIP as well as MMUSIC could be integrated. We divide an A/V collaboration system into three parts: A/V application endpoints, session servers and multipoint communication channels provider. Each collaboration system has a different implementation for the application endpoints, server components and different communication protocols between them. Various collaboration systems including Access Grid, H.323 and SIP are regarded as Web-services components in XGSP framework. They provide Web-services interface of their conference control protocols to the XGSP collaboration manager servers so that their RTP and data channels can be connected with the XGSP  media channel service under the control of the manager server.

Research Areas:

• Videoconferencing with Web Services:

     H.323, SIP, T.120, AccessGrid integration

• Multimedia Event Service:

     RTP over Narada

• Real Streaming and Achiving:

       provide RealStreaming and archiving service for videoconferencing and pro

• Instant Messaging :

     integrate Instant Messaging and videoconferencing