The Connection Control Protocol: Architecture Overview

What ingredients are needed to enable widespread personal teleconferencing over the Internet and NREN? Certainly, the integration of audio and video compression hardware into workstations is essential. However, network protocols are as critical to this goal. This is the focus of the work in the Multimedia Conferencing Project at ISI. Toward this end, ISI and BBN have developed an experimental packet teleconferencing system that currently is operating at several sites on the Terrestrial Wideband Network, TWBnet [2], and has more recently been ported to the DARPA Research Testbed, DARTnet, for further experimentation. The system allows geographically separated individuals to collaborate by combining real-time packet audio and video with shared computer workspaces, sometimes called groupware. We are designing and implementing protocols at a number of levels in the protocol stack: at the lower levels, real-time data communication services for the Internet in general [12, 3, 4]; and at higher levels, a connection management architecture to facilitate connections among heterogeneous systems.