Requirements for Floor Control Protocols
RFC 4376
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.
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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
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