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MECCANO -- Multimedia Education and Conferencing Collaboration over ATM Networks and Others
The MECCANO
project is part of the Telematics Programme of the European
Commission. The department Digitial Media and Networks (DMN) 1997
has been involved in its preceding project, MERCI,
as subcontractor of TELES
AG. For MECCANO, DMN has become Asscociate Contractor.
In MERCI, an IP-based multimedia communication platform has been
created. DMN largely participated in the development of a gateway that
mediates between traditional ISDN-based video conferences and modern
IP-based multimedia communication. The role of DMN in MECCANO is to
develop a new system architecture for this gateway and extend it in
several ways:
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The architectural re-design is intened to increase the
re-usability of the gateway's components as well as to simplify
future extensions. All components are to be integrated within a
single PC (in MERCI, some modules were restricted to run with
specific operation systems, so the gateway's functionality was
distributed over several computers).
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To interoperate with existing conference applications, the gateway
complies to the ITU-T international standard for multimedia
communication over the internet (H.323). Here, DMN's contribution is
twofold: on one hand, necessary IETF protocols (the Session Initiation
Protocol (SIP) in particular) are implemented and mapped onto
the relevant parts of H.323 functionality. On the other hand, an
interface to ISDN is implemented to extend interoperability to
arbitrary telephones (even mobile phones) with IP-based multimedia
conferences. You can download the ISDN-Mbone-Gateway AudioGate that
has been developed by TZI within the MECCANO project: audiogate-v0.3p5.tar.gz.
Moreover, the Message Bus
(Mbus), a local communication infrastructure used for the
gateway as well as multimedia applications, is developed in
cooperation between TZI and the University College
London (UCL). The Mbus provides a flexible message-based
communication interface to the system's components--independent
of the programming language used to implement them. On a
semantic level, a set of abstract interfaces is defined
(representing functional areas, e.g. calls, conference control,
security, media control etc.) that are mapped to specific
protocols by the respective modules. The gateway, for example,
implements an abstract call control model using a set of
independent modules for each necessary protocol: H.323, SIP, and
ISDN.
Table 1. Project data
| Cooperation partners: |
TELES AG, University College London,
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en
Automatique (INRIA),
Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET, Polen,
Communications Research Centre, Kanada,
EUTELSAT,
Hewlett-Packard European Laboratories, GB,
New Learning AS, Norwegen,
Rechenzentrum Universität Stuttgart,
School of Slavonic & East European Studies, University of London,
Shell International Exploration and Production B.V.,
Universitäten Erlangen-Nürnberg, Freiburg, Mannheim und Oslo. | | Staff: |
Dr. Jörg Ott,
Dirk Kutscher,
Olaf Bergmann,
Dr. Oliver Laumann
| | Duration: | 06/1998 — 05/2000 |
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