SIP Conferencing

RFC 4353 defines SIP procedures for the following common operations:

Creating Conferences (see RFC 5366 for providing an initial list of participants)
Adding/Removing Participants
Destroying Conferences
Obtaining Membership Information
Adding/Removing Media
Conference Announcements and Recordings

RFC 5850 defines “A Call Control and Multi-Party Usage Framework for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)”. RFC 4579 defines SIP Call Control - Conferencing for User Agents A variety of conferencing scenarios are described in RFC 4597.

Slide Notes

J. Rosenberg, "A Framework for Conferencing with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)", IETF, RFC 4353, February 2006 http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4353.txt Links to an external site.

G. Camarillo and A. Johnston, “Conference Establishment Using Request-Contained Lists in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)”, Internet Request for Comments, RFC Editor, RFC 5366 (Proposed Standard), ISSN 2070-1721, October 2008, http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5366.txt Links to an external site.

R. Mahy, R. Sparks, J. Rosenberg, D. Petrie, and A. Johnston, “A Call Control and Multi-Party Usage Framework for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)”, Internet Request for Comments, RFC Editor, RFC 5850 (Informational), ISSN 2070-1721, May 2010 http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5850.txt Links to an external site.

Johnston and O. Levin, “Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Call Control - Conferencing for User Agents”, Internet Request for Comments, RFC Editor, RFC 4579 (Best Current Practice), ISSN 2070-1721, August 2006 http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4579.txt Links to an external site.

R. Even and N. Ismail, “Conferencing Scenarios”, Internet Request for Comments, RFC Editor, RFC 4597 (Informational), ISSN 2070-1721, August 2006 http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4597.txt Links to an external site.

Transcript

[slide445] So RFC 4353 describes SIP conferencing, how you create them, how you add and remove participants, how you get rid of the conference, how you can find out who are the members in the conference, add and remove different media streams, and add announcements and even recordings. Not surprisingly, conferencing is a very big activity. Why? Well, I often am accused of thinking about meetings, which I view as one of the worst diseases that there is in Sweden, in terms of the cost, right? Because if you have a meeting, you have the N people in the meeting, times the cost of that person for however many hours the meeting goes, times the number of hours. And I've been known to walk out of meetings when this quantity is a value smaller than the amount we're discussing, because it means we're basically wasting money. But many meetings are considered very valuable, and are quite often important. So therefore, we need to make sure that we maximize that value for the people who are involved. So how can we do that? Well, by supporting things like recordings for them. So they can go back and say, OK, what happened? We'll see later that there's even a patent on a system that does speaker recognition, which logs who it is that was speaking. So now we can have a notation in the system, so you can see either visually or orally who's speaking, identify. Ah, it's so-and-so from the branch office in wherever. And that may be very important to your consideration of, hmm, is that what they're saying really important to me, or it really doesn't matter?