An SDL Specification of Coordination within a Teleconferencing System
Abstract
Advances in multimedia technology and highspeed networks leads to new types of applications. Especially, teleconferencing and collaborative work has emerged as new type of communication. Teleconferencing denotes synchronous collaboration, among a conference participants, that combine shared workspaces and live media (audio, video). Such media are computed and transported through a video conferencing system. Some of the problems, that the teleconferencing systems designers are faced with, we find synchronisation, session management and coordination, floor control and human habits to work in collaborative groups. Such problems are most of the time due to the complexity of these systems. Abstraction combined with the use of Formal Description Techniques, are ones of the most prevalent techniques to deal with complexity. In this work, we define an architecture of a teleconferencing system. This architecture consists in a coordination level and a videconferencing level. Then we present our experiment using SDL to describe the behaviors corresponding to the coordination and videoconferencing system components. We present also the interaction between such components.