Requirements for Floor Control Protocols
RFC 4376

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Network Working Group                                     P. Koskelainen
Request for Comments: 4376                                         Nokia
Category: Informational                                           J. Ott
                                       Helsinki University of Technology
                                                          H. Schulzrinne
                                                                   X. Wu
                                                     Columbia University
                                                           February 2006

                Requirements for Floor Control Protocols

Status of This Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).

Abstract

   Floor control is a means to manage joint or exclusive access to
   shared resources in a (multiparty) conferencing environment.
   Thereby, floor control complements other functions -- such as
   conference and media session setup, conference policy manipulation,
   and media control -- that are realized by other protocols.  This
   document defines the requirements for a floor control protocol for
   multiparty conferences in the context of an existing framework.

Koskelainen, et al.          Informational                      [Page 1]
RFC 4376          Floor Control Protocol Requirements      February 2006

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................2
   2. Conventions Used in This Document ...............................3
   3. Terminology .....................................................3
   4. Model ...........................................................4
   5. Integration with Conferencing ...................................5
   6. Assumptions about a Conference Policy ...........................6
   7. Floor Control Protocol Requirements .............................7
      7.1. Communication between Participant and Server ...............7
      7.2. Communication between Chair and Server .....................9
      7.3. General Protocol Requirements ..............................9
   8. Security Considerations ........................................10
   9. Acknowledgements ...............................................11
   10. References ....................................................12
      10.1. Normative References .....................................12
      10.2. Informative References ...................................12

1.  Introduction

   Conference applications often have shared resources such as the right
   to talk, input access to a limited-bandwidth video channel, or a
   pointer or input focus in a shared application.

   In many cases, it is desirable to be able to control who can provide
   input (send/write/control, depending on the application) to the
   shared resource.

   Floor control enables applications or users to gain safe and mutually
   exclusive or non-exclusive input access to the shared object or
   resource.  The floor is an individual temporary access or
   manipulation permission for a specific shared resource (or group of
   resources) [6].

   Floor control is an optional feature for conferencing applications.
   SIP [2] conferencing applications may also decide not to support this
   feature at all.  Two-party applications may use floor control outside
   conferencing, although the usefulness of this kind of scenario is
   limited.  Floor control may be used together with the conference
   policy control protocol (CPCP) [7], or it may be used as an
   independent stand-alone protocol, e.g., with SIP but without CPCP.

   Floor control has been studied extensively over the years (e.g., [8],
   [6], and [5]); therefore, earlier work can be leveraged here.

   The present document describes the requirements for a floor control
   protocol.  As a requirements specification, the document makes no
   assumptions about the later implementation of the respective

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RFC 4376          Floor Control Protocol Requirements      February 2006

   requirements as parts of one or more protocols or about the entities
   implementing them and their roles.

   This document may be used in conjunction with other documents, such
   as the conferencing framework document [3].  In particular, when
   speaking about a floor control server, this entity may be identical
   to or co-located with the focus or a conference policy server defined
   in the framework document, while participants and floor chairs
   referred to in this specification may be regular participants as
   introduced in the conferencing framework document.  In this
   specification, the term "floor control protocol" is used in an
   abstract sense and may ultimately be mapped to any of the existing