CONFIANCE / News: Recent posts

A paper on CONFIANCE and DCON has been recently presented at the IPTComm 2007 conference (Principles, Systems and Applications of IP Telecommunications) in New York. After the discussion of the paper, which described the scalability enhancements DCON can offer, a demo of the described work has been successfully arranged for all the interested attendees.
You can have a look at all the presented work (slides, proceedings, and a couple of videos as well) on the documentation page (http://confiance.sf.net/doc).

A user-friendly, interactive, installer script for CONFIANCE is now available.
It allows an automatic retrieval, compilation and installation of all the needed pieces of the framework (Asterisk, Minisip, BFCP, MSRP, Videomixers and both client and server side patches), without having to take care of each one separately. The script is interactive, which means you can choose what to compile and what not (for example if you've already installed a component).
You can get the gz-compressed script from the download page:... read more

Exciting news in CONFIANCE!
The new release introduces support for video mixing and transcoding functionality, so that to provide continuous video presence in conferences. To do so, CONFIANCE can rely on two different videomixers:

* CONFIANCE VideoMixer, a work we're carrying on ourselves, and which you can get on the CONFIANCE homepage;
* Sergio Garcia Murillo's VideoMixer, an open source videomixer available on http://sip.fontventa.com/.... read more

An article about DCON has been recently published on the March issue of the IEEE Communications Magazine:

A. Buono, S. Loreto, L. Miniero, S.P. Romano "A distributed IMS enabled conferencing architecture on top of a standard centralized conferencing framework", IEEE Communications Magazine vol.45, No 3, March 2007 (requires IEEE subscription or membership)

A demo of the DCON framework in action has also been successfully presented at the latest IEEE INFOCOM 2007 conference, the 26th Annual IEEE Conference on Computer Communications in Anchorage, Alaska. You can get the presented brochure from the Documentation page.... read more

CONFIANCE version 0.6 has just been released:

* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_server-0.6.tar.gz?download, the server side of the platform;
* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_client-0.6.tar.gz?download, the client side of the platform.

Starting from this release, the stable 1.4.x versions of Asterisk will be used as a base, instead of the SVN one, to ease versioning, debugging and patching.... read more

The work on CONFIANCE is going on.
In the meanwhile, we've opened two new projects on Sourceforge. They host the libraries we implemented, and on which CONFIANCE relies to take advantage of their features, specifically:

* libBFCP (http://sourceforge.net/projects/libbfcp), the libraries implementing the BFCP (Binary Floor Control Protocol) stack;
* libMSRP (http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmsrp), the libraries implementing the MSRP (Message Session Relay Protocol) stack, which is currently being integrated within CONFIANCE to add chatroom functionality to XCON conferences.... read more

A new update on CONFIANCE is available on the project download page:

* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_server-0.5.tar.gz?download, the server side of the platform;
* http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/confiance/confiance_wip_client-0.5.tar.gz?download, the client side of the platform.

Minor updates include several bugfixes, a verbose debug level to optionally limit the amount of console notifications about what's happening, and enhancements upon the XCON/DCON integration support.... read more

After some weeks of silence, we can finally provide you with many interesting news.
The SVN branch containing our server-side addons for Asterisk has changed location, which means that from now on you'll have to change the address to access it:

* svn co http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/team/group/xcon_bfcp

The updates upon the Work in Progress version of our platform are as usual available on the project download page:... read more

A new package (confiance_wip_webservice-03.zip) has been made available in the CONFIANCE project: it is a set of web applications which enables you to interact with the CONFIANCE framework through the web, using a WebService-based approach. For more information on the architecture and the implementation details, checkout the documentation in the package, and feel free to contact us if you need more clearance or are interested in the work.... read more

After some weeks of silence, we can finally provide you with many interesting news.
First of all, the WIP on Confiance has gone on despite the lack of updates on the site, and is now quite stable. Besides, a separate branch containing our server-side addons for Asterisk has been made available (many thanks to Russell for that), which means you can access it via SVN to always get up-do-date revisions:... read more

Since both the CONFIANCE client and server WIP files come in the form of source diff files (being them based on existing, opportunely modified, open-source components), we made available a separate tarball package too which only contains the BFCP (Binary Floor Control Protocol) management libraries. The available libraries, which have been implemented according to the v07 draft specifications of the BFCP (attached), are:
* BFCP_library, the upper layer library managing all the BFCP behaviour (e.g. connection between Floor Control Server and Floor Control Participants, advanced floor management, and so on);
* BFCP_messages_processing, the lower library taking care of both building and parsing of the BFCP binary messages out of the required arguments (included in BFCP_library, so only use it if you want to implement a BFCP behaviour on your own).
The package (confiance-v7bfcp-only) can be found in the project download page.

An update upon the Work in Progress version of our platform is now available in the project download page.
The update fixes many issues that have been found by testing both the server and client sides of the framework Besides, the client side of the the Scheduler Text Protocol component has been enriched with two new interfaces:
* SetChair, to let the conference administrators choose a chair moderator for a specific floor in the conference itself;
* Unregister, to enable the conference administrators to unregister a previously created conference, so that to definitely remove it from the conference (if the conference is currently active, it is destroyed).
Both the new features require the administrator's password to be called, since only the conference creators will be allowed to edit existing conference settings.
Let us know what you think about the platform and if you encounter any problem using it, any comment and suggestion will be more than welcome.

A new mailing list for CONFIANCE, confiance-devel, has just been opened: subscribe if you're interested in the CONFIANCE development and news. Feel also free to refer to this list to report any bug and/or strange behaviour you should encounter while testing the framework.

We're strongly working on the framework and on bugfixes: in a few days a new version of the WIP will be available.

The Work in Progress version of our platform is available in the project download page, with these new features implemented so far:

* the BFCP messages building/parsing library has been updated to the v07 draft specifications of the BFCP, and now there's support for the transport of BFCP information through SDP in both the server side and the client side as specified in the BFCP MMUSIC draft;
* a new, more scalable, layer between the building/parsing library and the server/client application has been implemented to take care of BFCP server/client behaviour;
* the platform now supports more than one floor, namely Audio (as in the previous, stable/outdated version) and Video (basic BFCP-moderated videoswitching, not fully working yet since Minisip is not video-enabled yet);
* more policies upon automatic conference management and more settings upon floors, like the possibility to choose the number of persons who can have the same floor granted at the same time, and the possibility to associate more resources with the same floor (to allow for example pure one-speaker-per-time videoconferencing) have been added as a choice for the Conference Creator/Administrator;
* now the Conference Administrator and the Floor Chair(s) roles have been better defined through the separation between the Administrator's Password (to manage a conference as administrator through the Scheduling Text Protocol) and the old calling PIN (which is only to be used to specify if a conference has private or public access);
* the Scheduler Text Protocol has been improved to allow more functionality, even if not all the possible messages have an interface in the client-side yet (namely the Unregister and SetChair); ... read more

CONFIANCE (CONFerencing IMS-enabled Architecture for Next-generation Communication Experience) is an actual implementation of a conferencing framework compliant with the IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem (IMS) specification. The architecture has been conceived at the outset by taking into account ongoing standardization efforts inside the various active international bodies (IETF, 3GPP, OMA, etc). At its current state, it is capable to provide audio conferencing facilities with session management capabilities and floor control. The system presented is intended to serve as a running experimental testbed useful for protocol testing, as well as field trials and experimentations.
Such platform has been realized in the framework of a collaboration activity involving the University of Naples and Ericsson's Nomadic Lab in Helsinki.
We had to work both on the client and on the server side, as well as on the communication protocols between them. On the client side we implemented the two roles envisaged in the IETF XCON (Centralized Conferencing) architecture, namely the simple participant and the chair. On the server side, we implemented the role of the XCON focus. Finally, coming to the communication protocols, besides implementing BFCP (Binary Floor Control Protocol) as it is currently specified in the IETF, we also designed and realized a brand new conferencing text-based control protocol.
On the server side, we adopted Asterisk, an open source PBX. We added to Asterisk the following three new modules:
i) XConMe, used to manage conferences;
ii) BFCP, the server side library implementing the floor control protocol;
iii) Scheduler, the server side component implementing the conference scheduling protocol. ... read more