Multimedia transmissions and collaborative environment

The Multimedia transmissions and collaborative environment activity is an application oriented activity building a middleware layer on top of the high throughput optical networks. This layer supports multimedia content sharing and related end user communication. The activity is split into three basic areas:

1. synchronous transfers with a signaling infrastructure (SIP, H.323),
2. synchronous transfers without standard signaling infrastructure,
3. asynchronous transfers via audio and video streaming.

The activity goal is research, development, and extensions of communication technologies that covers signaling protocols and corresponding infrastructures, multimedia transfer protocols, and sharing, storage, and application use of the multimedia data.

In the first area we focus primary on the research, development, and quality of rich multimedia services (audio, video, text, and presence) using standard signaling protocols (H.323, SIP, SS7), services (MCU, ENUM), and their relation to the whole environment. Current production VoIP infrastructure includes more than 30 connected telephone exchanges (PBX) and increasing number of IP clients using audio and video data. Our goal is geographical (interconnection with other NRENs, academic and non-academic institutions) and technological (properties of end user devices, protocols, etc.) integration. Specific goal is a targeted support for design and construction of communication (videoconferencing) rooms located at the CESNET member institutions and eventually elsewhere. All this work will be complemented with strong security considerations.

In the second area we focus on the development of the user controlled elements for multipoint synchronous communication. Results of the previous research are continuously put into production service as a communication environment with Mbone tools. New research is focused on the QoS enabled elements. We also work on the multipoint wide area transmission of uncompressed HD and 4K video, with the use of active element infrastructure and with a perspective use of optical multicast. We also study psychological aspects of collaborative environments.

In the last area we operate streaming servers used by the academic community. The research focuses on the multimedia search engine, in this year we will extend its field of activity to all European countries. We will also increase availability of the HD (compressed) streaming for the distance community. We also collaborate with the media industry on more deployment of the TV streaming (especially in the HD quality).