Managing shared ephemeral teleconferencing state: Policy and mechanism

Abstract

In recent years there has been dramatic progress on the enabling technologies for workstation-based multimedia teleconferencing applications. We expect that such applications will soon become an important component of many future social and business interactions. Teleconferencing applications have aspects of their state, such as membership, types of media being used, and encryption, that are under joint control. Much of this state is ephemeral, in that it is of importance only for the duration of a session, and does not have importance outside of the session itself. In this paper we focus on the specification and realization of policies for managing this shared ephemeral teleconferencing state. We first define a broad family of policies which has three dimensions: initiation, voting, and consistency. We then present a mechanism that implements this family of policies for two different communication models.