A COMPARISON OF FRAMEWORKS FOR MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING: SIP AND H.323

In this paper we survey the conferencing architectures in H.323 and SIP. We give a compact review of the H.323 framework and capture the current status of the emerging SIP conferencing architecture. Subsequently we present a qualitative comparison of the schemes under study. The evaluation criteria are scalability to large conference sizes and to large geographical dispersion of participants ,as well as adaptiveness to heterogeneity in media streams format and protocol implementation. Our findings suggest that both architectures have certain advantages and limitations. Wherever possible we propose measures to overcome the latter. Concluding, we propose future work to mitigate the identified gaps in the SIP conferencing framework.