Realising real time multimedia groupware on the web

Real-time audio and video conferencing has not yet been satisfactorily integrated into web-based groupware environments. Conferencing tools are at best only loosely linked to other parts of a shared working environment. This is mainly due to the special Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that these types of resources demand. This paper describes an approach to overcoming this problem by integrating the management of video and audio conferences into the resource allocation mechanism of an existing web-based groupware framework. The issue of adaptation is discussed and a means of initialising multimedia session parameters based on predicted QoS is described. In addition to linking audio and video media rendering quality to the predicted network QoS, the use of models to reduce bandwidth is also explored, replacing video content with control data. Component technologies utilised include the TAGS groupware framework, the Java Media Framework, a Conference Control Architecture and VRML-based avatars that can intermix with real actors.