NTRULO: A Tunneling Architecture for Multimedia Conferencing over IP

SIP APIs for voice and video communications on the web

“…In particular, the architecture is platform independent, can be easily implemented, and is flexible enough to accommodate new codecs, application protocols (e.g., SIP/RTP) or NAT/firewall traversal techniques in the long term. For instance, with the emergence of CDN, one can easily use media over HTTP for many application scenarios using the adaptor approach [1]. In the short term, our approach is easy to implement because of browser independence, and use of existing web protocols and tools.…”

“…Our project aims for web communication widgets to become as common on web pages as other components such as layout, buttons, images and multimedia players. We believe that the transformational benefits for both web applications and communications are (1) in enabling millions of web developers to include communications on their web pages and (2) in the seamless integration of web applications with communications having the potential of new, innovative applications.…”

“…The main advantages of our approach are: (1) it has the flexibility of using any transport protocol including UDP, adding any new codecs or NAT traversal technologies, (2) one can use portable programming languages such as Python or Java to quickly build it, whereas modification to browser typically requires C/C++, (3) it is browser independent and hence easier to implement, (4) one can use it together with a Flash application for portable device access to further simplify the implementation. The main problems are: (1) it requires yet another installation by the end user and this potentially hampers wide adoption, (2) security and access control requires careful design to prevent unauthorized access and leaking of private information in the adaptor to the web page or to other users on a multi user system, (3) it is difficult to re-use authentication mechanisms already provided by standard web-browsers for media path.…”

“…We believe that the disconnect between RIA and VoIP is due to technical as well as non-technical reasons: (1) web developers and organizations work in a fast-paced quick turn-around easy-to-use application mind set, and do not want to entertain the complexity of SIP-family of standards, (2) web organizations want to own their content and customer interactions and hence prefer proprietary protocols over standards-based open systems, and also (3) critical programming primitives such as UDP transport, listening socket and native device access that are needed for VoIP are missing in present web languages and browsers. With the tremendous growth and innovation on the web in recent years, web developers started using browser plugins and server gateways to support communication within the limitations of a browser.…”

“…More recently, standards bodies have identified two parts to web communications [8,12]: (1) specific HTML/Javascript extensions to enable new elements for devices, codecs, and communication, and (2) on-the-wire protocol to enable end-to-end communication among browser instances. While standardization of these tasks in W3C and IETF may take a few years, we focus on pre-standard implementations using existing technologies and describe the short and long term benefits of our project.…”