KR20050114290A - Voting method for tightly coupled multi-conference system and thereof system - Google Patents

Abstract

The present invention describes a method and system that can provide a voting service based on a tightly coupled multi-conference system. The conference server uses SIP's mass invite feature to reinvite SIP sessions, renegotiate SDP to maintain existing conference sessions, and to define, distribute and process media for voting services in accordance with media policies. It also provides anonymity to conference participants under the membership policy. Accordingly, the present invention provides a service that allows conference participants to derive a unified agreement while maintaining a conference framework and policy using SIP, SDP, CPCP, RTP, FCP, and media protocols.

Description

VOTING METHOD FOR TIGHTLY COUPLED MULTI-CONFERENCE SYSTEM AND THEREOF SYSTEM}

The present invention relates to a conference system based on the Internet protocol, and more particularly to a method and system for providing a voting service in a tightly coupled multi-conference system.

In a situation where the number of Internet terminal subscribers is increasing, standardization is actively progressed with the goal of opening the service to satisfy the demand for various services. The basic idea of service opening is the same, but the Internet Engineering Task Forcing (IETF) standardizes working groups (WGs) to provide Internet Protocol (IP) services based on Session Initialization Protocol (SIP). Multimedia conference topologies required to provide representative conference services include central control and mixing, centralized signal management and media server, and central control and pole mesh mixing. and Full-Mesh Mixing and Cascaded Conferences.

Multimedia conference topologies are further subdivided into tightly coupled and loosely coupled bases. As services are shifted to operators, multimedia conferences are being established as a close coupling based service that can be easily authenticated, charged and controlled using central management and full mesh mixing methods, compared to a loosely coupled foundation. Most manufacturers and service providers choose SIP as the service profile protocol for providing a variety of services, including multi-media conferences, from H.232-based conference control technology.

Among the standardization related to multimedia conferences, standardization related to conference policy, media policy, and floor control is separated by a working group called IETF XCON. The IETF XCON tightly coupled multi-conference consists of several entities to support multi-party communication and services, using SIP for session establishment, maintenance and removal, and Real Time Protocol (RTP) for multimedia transmission and reception. It provides a commercially available and standardized way of taking centralized forms for billing. In addition, the CPCP (Conference Policy Control Protocol) is used to access the conference policy server to control the transfer of information related to conference policy, such as setting, changing, creating, and deleting conference policies. These tightly coupled multi-conferences require conference control mechanisms such as conference management, user management, voice control, and conference merge / separation, which provide participants with services.

However, these requirements and frameworks are only established by each company and provider, and the specific protocol operation proposed by the standardization body is not established. There is also a need to clarify the interface between the policy server, media server, caller and conference server for multimedia conferences.

Accordingly, an object of the present invention, which was devised to solve the problems of the prior art operating as described above, is to provide a voting service method for deriving a unified consensus of various participants in a conference using communication.

An object of the present invention is to provide conference participants while maintaining sessions and policies between participants in a tightly coupled multi-conference framework using SIP, Session Description Protocol (SDP), RTP, CPCP, Floor Control Protocol (FCP), and media protocols. It is to provide a voting service method that enables a uniform consensus.

In order to achieve the above object, an embodiment of the present invention provides a method for voting service in a tightly coupled multi-conference system based on an Internet protocol.

Establishing a conference session according to a conference policy including a predetermined membership policy and a media policy between a plurality of participants and the conference server,

If a voting service is required, the conference server re-invite the participants in a mass invitation manner according to the conference policy;

When the participants respond to the conference server, the conference server multicasting voting media for the voting service to the participants;

Receiving votes corresponding to the voting media from the participants.

In another embodiment of the present invention, in a tightly coupled multi-conference system based on the Internet protocol to support the voting service,

And a conference server configured to establish a conference session for multi-conference with the plurality of participants and the plurality of participants,

The conference server,

Conference policies, including predetermined membership and media policies;

A conference policy server that manages the conference policy and determines if a request for the voting service is reasonable based on the conference policy if a voting service is required;

The conference policy to manage the conference session between the participants and the conference server, to reinvite the participants in a mass invitation manner if the request of the voting service is reasonable, and to receive a response to the re-invitation from the participants. A focus processor that accesses,

And a mixer for multicasting voting media for the voting service to the participants in response to a voting media distribution request from the focus processor.

Hereinafter, with reference to the accompanying drawings will be described in detail the operating principle of the preferred embodiment of the present invention. In the following description of the present invention, detailed descriptions of well-known functions or configurations will be omitted if it is determined that the detailed description of the present invention may unnecessarily obscure the subject matter of the present invention. Terms to be described later are terms defined in consideration of functions in the present invention, and may be changed according to intentions or customs of users or operators. Therefore, the definition should be made based on the contents throughout the specification.

The present invention, which will be described later, uses the CPCP to guarantee the anonymity of the participants in the membership policy of the conference policy, and delivers information about the voting media to the focus processor (Focus) processor which is a central controller. The focus processor then re-invites the participants' SIP sessions using a feature called mass invitation, allowing the participants to vote while maintaining the existing session.

The SIP session begins with an invitation from the side to start the session and a response from the other side. Thus, a session between two users, or two terminals, is formed by one invitation and the other. If you want to establish sessions simultaneously with two or more multiple users, the central controller will send mass invitations to multiple users at the same time to form sessions at once. When changing the characteristics of the SIP session is used to re-invite the SIP session, if you want to change the characteristics of the session with several users at once, likewise invites the session again using mass invitation. Accordingly, in the preferred embodiment of the present invention, the SIP function is used to change the characteristics while maintaining the existing session to perform a voting service by a plurality of users.

Hereinafter, a procedure for providing a voting service in a tightly coupled multi-conference is described.

1 shows the structure of a tightly coupled multi-conference system according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

Referring to FIG. 1, the tightly coupled multi-conference system is composed of a conference server 120, a floor chair 140, and participants 150, 152, and the conference server 120 again includes a focus processor (Focus) 122. , A conference notification server 124, a conference policy server 126, a conference policy 128, and a mixer 134.

The focus processor 122 is responsible for central control in the IETF XCON tightly coupled multi-conference. It manages SIP sessions for all participants 150,152 at the conference and has access to conference policy 128. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the focus processor 122 re-invites the session using a mass invitation of SIP and renegotiates the SDP to enable a voting service while maintaining the existing session. . For example, if a conference supports a video service and you want to switch to a voting service, make sure that the video of the voting user is not sent to others. In this case, the setting of the session is changed so as not to use an image as a transmission medium.

Conference notification server 124 provides a NOTIFY service in the SIP protocol. That is, a message about the conference information is notified to the participants 150 and 152. Conference policy server 126 manages and processes conference policy 128.

Conference policy 128 is a type of storage that stores an aggregate set of all rules governing the work of the conference, and is classified into membership policy 130 and media policy 132. Membership policy 130 is responsible for the policy for participants 150, 152 of conference policy 128. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the membership policy 130 requires the focus processor 122 to anonymize participants 150,152. Anonymous processing of the participants 150, 152 is set to the flag value. That is, the membership policy 130 includes a flag field indicating anonymity of each participant, and sets the value of the flag field to '1' when the focus processor 122 requests it. If the flag field is '0', the real name of the participant is disclosed. Media policy 132 is responsible for the policy for media of conference policy 128. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, the focus processor 122 provides information of data to be exchanged with each other before the SDP negotiation.

The mixer 134 receives the same kind of media streams and reprocesses them, and distributes them to participants 150 and 152 using multicasting. There are four types of data that the mixer 134 can process: video, audio, text, and applications. Participants 150 and 152 refer to users or automata who participate in the conference. Participants 150 and 152 are normal participants who can receive a conference service while establishing a session with the focus processor 122 according to the membership policy 130, and participants who only form a session with the focus processor 122 and receive no service. And, among the normal participants are classified into four categories: an anonymous user who announces their attendance but hides their identity, and a hidden user whose attendance and identity are not known.

The floor 142 refers to a floor for temporarily accessing a specific shared resource. In other words, it means the right to temporarily access and use resources that allow participants 150,152 to speak in a tightly coupled multi-conference. The floor chairs 140 and 142 refer to participants who manage the right to speak. According to a preferred embodiment of the present invention, if the participant 150 or 152 proposes to vote, the floor chair 140 requests a voting service from the conference policy server 126 using CPCP.

All of the above entities are logical units, and in actual implementation, the entities may form a server group in the form of an independent server, or may be configured by mounting each module of a single server. The protocols used for the voting procedure between the entities are as follows.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) 101 is a signaling protocol for creating, modifying and terminating a multimedia service session. As a protocol of the application layer, both TCP and UDP can be used and take a request / response structure. The SIP 101 exchanges information on a media type to be exchanged in a SIP session by using a Session Description Protocol (SDP).

Real Time Protocol (RTP) 103 is an Internet protocol for transmitting real-time data, such as audio and video, generally executed over a UDP protocol.

The Conference Policy Control Protocol (CPCP) 107, 113 is a protocol used to allow a user to access and process a conference policy.

The floor control protocol (FCP) 105 is a protocol for controlling the voice and allows the resource to be used even when mutually exclusive and non-exclusively with respect to the shared resources of the conference server 120.

Media protocol 115 is a protocol used to exchange information about media between focus processor 122 and mixer 134.

Here, if the voting procedure proposed by the present invention is introduced, the tightly coupled multi-conference works as follows.

Participants 150, 152 and floor chain 140 are using SIP 101 to create a session with focus processor 122 and participate in a conference, likewise from conference announcement server 124 using SIP 101. Receive conference information. In addition, the RTP 103 transmits and receives a conference data stream. SIP 101 and RTP 103 are used in the normal conference participation process.

One participant 150 speaks at the current conference using FCP 105. The speech information is passed to the mixer 134 using the RTP 103, which distributes the stream to other participants 152, 140 using multicasting.

When the participant 150 with the floor 142 proposes to vote, the floor chair 140 managing the floor 142 requests the conference policy server 126 to vote using the CPCP 107. Conference policy server 126 checks if the request conforms to conference policy 128. If the voting request is legitimate and in accordance with the conference policy 128, the conference policy server 126 requests processing of the membership policy 130 and the media policy 132. The membership policy 130 changes the conference participant to an anonymous participant to perform the process of ensuring the anonymity of the participant, and the media policy 132 defines characteristics of the media to be used for voting.

The focus processor 122 transmits the requirements required by the policies 130 and 132 using CPCP. At this time, the focus processor 122 uses an anonymous processing of the participant based on the membership policy 130 and the mass invitation based on the media policy 132, and uses the SIP to re-invite the SDP for voting media type conversion. By renegotiating, we provide voting services to participants while maintaining existing sessions. The mixer 134 transmits and receives voting media based on the media policy information received from the focus processor 122 through the CPCP.

2 shows a message flow diagram of a participant and conference for a voting service according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention. Although only one participant 150 is shown here, in practice the same procedure may be performed between the conference server 120 and a plurality of participants including the floor chair 140.

Referring to FIG. 2, in step 201, session control using SIP is performed between participants and a conference server before the voting procedure is started. In step 201, participants can successfully participate in the conference using SIP.

In process 203 the focus processor 122 of the conference server 120 reinvites the participant 150 in a mass invitation manner based on the conference policy 128 for voting. In step 203, the SDP information for the session is modified by the re-invitation process to provide a foundation for providing a voting service while maintaining the existing session.

In step 205, the participant 150 accepts the re-invitation of the conference server 120 using the signal of the SIP, and informs that the voting service is ready. At the same time, the conference server 120 anonymizes the conference participant 150 using the flag value based on the membership policy 130.

In step 207 the conference server 120 actually multicasts the voting media to the participants 150 using RTP. At this time, use of the floor is prohibited or limited to the floor chair 140 only. In the present specification, the voting media is a kind of voting paper that enables the participant 150 to vote. The choices that appear on the ballot may range from two to several candidates in the case of a vote. In other cases, if voting via multimedia is supported, the voting media will show various candidate video streams and ask for or against each video stream.

In step 209, the participant 150 performs voting using the voting media received through the RTP, and unicasts his / her vote to the conference server 120 using the RTP. Thereafter, the conference server 120 collects votes of a plurality of participants to derive a final vote result, and announces them to the plurality of participants using a NOTIFY service of SIP by using the conference notification server 124. do.

Figure 3 shows the processing by the entity participating in each vote with the usage protocol for the proposed voting procedure according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

Referring to FIG. 3, a participant 150 who speaks using the FCP in step 301 proposes a vote to the floor chair 140 or the participants 152. If the conference itself was created with voting as the final goal, then step 301 is omitted and immediately begins at step 303.

In step 303 the floor chair 140 checks the voting proposal and, if appropriate, requests the conference policy server 126 to vote using CPCP. If in step 305 the voting request is legitimate and in accordance with the conference policy 128, then the conference policy server 126 may process anonymize participants 140, 150 and 152 according to the membership policy 130. The focus processor 122 is requested. If in step 307 the voting request is legitimate and in accordance with the conference policy 128, the conference policy server requests the focus processor 122 for media processing to be used for voting in accordance with the media policy 132. Process 305 and process 307 may be processed simultaneously regardless of the order.

In step 309, all policy and session modification information processed by the conference policy server 126 is transmitted to the focus processor 122 through CPCP. Based on the received information, the focus processor 122 performs overall important tasks related to voting. In step 311, the focus processor 122 transmits the media processing request received according to the media policy 132 to the mixer 134 to instruct preparation of the voting media. At this time, the communication between the focus processor 122 and the mixer 134 uses a media protocol.

In step 313 the focus processor 122 re-invites voting participants using the Mass Invitation of SIP. In step 313, the focus processor 122 prepares to perform the voting procedure while maintaining the existing session by modifying the SDP information for the existing session. In block 315 the participant 150 accepts the re-invitation of the focus processor 122 to indicate that he is ready to vote.

In step 317, the focus processor 122 requests the mixer 134 to distribute the voting media using the media protocol so that the participant 150 can receive the voting media. In step 319 the mixer 134 multicasts the voting media to all participants participating in the voting using RTP. In step 321 the participant 150 responds to the mixer 134 using RTP to cast its vote according to the voting media. In step 323, the mixer 134 organizes all the voting contents received from the participants and transmits them to the focus processor 122 using the media protocol. In operation 325, the focus processor 122 announces the voting result to the participants through the conference notification server 124. The focus processor 122 then uses the mass invitation to modify the session information to the state before voting, returning the multi-conference before voting to the state.

Meanwhile, in the detailed description of the present invention, specific embodiments have been described, but various modifications are possible without departing from the scope of the present invention. Therefore, the scope of the present invention should not be limited to the described embodiments, but should be defined not only by the scope of the following claims, but also by those equivalent to the scope of the claims.

In the present invention operating as described in detail above, the effects obtained by the representative ones of the disclosed inventions will be briefly described as follows.

The present invention provides a procedure that allows participants to conduct voting while ensuring anonymity based on a tightly coupled multi-conference system. In other words, the present invention renegotiates the SDP using the mass invitation of SIP, thereby voting by conference policy and media policy using known protocols while maintaining the existing session. Accordingly, the present invention provides a service that allows conference participants to reach a unified agreement while maintaining a conference framework and policy.

1 illustrates the structure of a tightly coupled multi-conference system according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

2 is a message flow diagram of a participant and conference for a voting service according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 3 is a diagram illustrating the processing content of each entity participating in each voting with the usage protocol for the proposed voting procedure according to the preferred embodiment of the present invention.

Claims (20)

A voting service method in a tightly coupled multi-conference system based on internet protocol, Establishing a conference session according to a conference policy including a predetermined membership policy and a media policy between a plurality of participants and the conference server, If a voting service is required, the conference server re-invite the participants in a mass invitation manner according to the conference policy; When the participants respond to the conference server, the conference server multicasting voting media for the voting service to the participants; Receiving votes corresponding to the voting media from the participants. The method of claim 1, wherein the reinviting process comprises: And re-negotiate a session description including a media type to be exchanged in the conference session to perform the voting service while maintaining the conference session. The method of claim 2, wherein the reinviting process comprises: And modifying the session content using a Session Description Protocol. The method of claim 1, wherein the reinviting process comprises: And re-invite the participants using a Session Initialization Protocol. 2. The method of claim 1, further comprising anonymizing the participants based on the membership policy at the conference server. 2. The method of claim 1, further comprising the conference server defining the voting media based on the media policy. 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the voting media and the voting are transmitted using a Real-time Transport Protocol. The floor chair of claim 1, wherein when a participant having a voice among the plurality of participants proposes to vote, a floor chair managing the voice among the plurality of participants uses a conference policy control protocol. Requesting the voting service from the conference server. The method as claimed in claim 1, further comprising the step of notifying the participants of the voting results according to the votings using a notification service of a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). 10. The method of claim 9, further comprising the step of inviting the participants in a mass invitation manner by the conference server to return the session contents of the conference session to the pre-voting service after announcing the voting result. The method. In the tightly coupled multi-conference system based on the Internet protocol to support the voting service, And a conference server configured to establish a conference session for multi-conference with the plurality of participants and the plurality of participants, The conference server, Conference policies, including predetermined membership and media policies; A conference policy server that manages the conference policy and determines if a request for the voting service is reasonable based on the conference policy if a voting service is required; The conference policy to manage the conference session between the participants and the conference server, to reinvite the participants in a mass invitation manner if the request of the voting service is reasonable, and to receive a response to the re-invitation from the participants. A focus processor that accesses, And a mixer for multicasting voting media for the voting service to the participants in response to a voting media distribution request from the focus processor. The method of claim 11, wherein the focus processor, And renegotiate a session description including a media type to be exchanged in the conference session to perform the voting service while maintaining the conference session. The method of claim 12, wherein the focus processor, And modify the session content using a Session Description Protocol. The method of claim 11, wherein the focus processor, Re-invite the participants using a Session Initialization Protocol. 12. The system of claim 11, wherein the focus processor anonymizes the participants based on the membership policy if the request for the voting service is reasonable. 12. The system of claim 11, wherein the focus processor defines the voting media according to the media policy if the request for the voting service is reasonable. 12. The system of claim 11, wherein the voting media and the voting are transmitted using a Real-time Transport Protocol. The method of claim 11, wherein the plurality of participants, With one participant who has a voice and proposes the above voting service, And a floor chair that manages the right to speak and requests the voting service from the conference policy server using a conference policy control protocol. 12. The system of claim 11, further comprising a conference notification server that notifies the participants of the voting results according to the votes using a session initialization protocol (SIP) announcement service. 20. The system of claim 19, wherein the focus processor is And after the conference announcement server announces the voting result, re-invite the participants in a mass invitation manner to return the session content of the conference session to before the voting service.