Conferencing Control
charter-ietf-confctrl-01

The demand for Internet packet teleconferencing has arrived. Yet, an
infrastructure to support the demand is barely in place. Conference
control is one component of the infrastructure, and may be defined as
the management and coordination of multiple sessions, and their multiple
users in multiple media. The Conference Control Working Group is
chartered
to design a session layer protocol to perform these functions.

Toward this end, the Working Group will catalogue existing approaches
to conference control, identify the requirements for providing these
services across the general Internet, then define a small, but broad
set of conference styles that are most useful to support. For
instance, we anticipate the need to accommodate both loose- and
tightly-controlled sessions. Ultimately, the WG will work to specify,
implement and deploy the confctrl protocol within IETF teleconferencing
software over the MBONE. While scalability will be a critical design
goal, the full implication of security is likely to be addressed at
later stages in the effort.

This Working Group falls under the supervision of the Remote
Conferencing Architecture steering group. As such, it will provide an
interface to the Realtime Transport Protocol proposed in the
Audio/Video Transport Working Group. In addition, this Working Group
will track the progress of other groups as they relate to the confctrl
effort: directory services for cataloguing users and conferences,
resource reservation and management at the network level, schemes for
multicast address allocation.