The Big Picture

We believe that there will be many occasions when the multiplexing facilities of the CMMC are not required, as conferences can be entirely workstation and multicast based. When this is the case, it does not make sense for the CMMC to be used as a hub, or to route traffic through the CMMC. However, when the multiplexing facilities of the CMMC are required by some remote sites, the same distributed multicast based conferencing software should be usable at the rest of the remote sites. This greatly affects the way we view the CMMC's role:

For entirely distributed multicast based conferences, the CMMC has no multiplexing role.
For a conference that is primarily multicast based with only a few sites requiring multiplexing, the CMMC should not be viewed as the centre of the conference (there is no centre as such). It is only the centre of the sub-conference comprising the sites requiring multiplexing. The CMMC thus provides a gateway between the hub based sites, and the multicast based sites.
For a conference this uses entirely hardware or ISDN based codecs, the CMMC is a true conference MCU in the form envisaged by telecoms companies, though usually it will also provide additional functionality.

The important point here is that the CMMC should be able to move gracefully from one extreme to the other, and this has a strong influence on the way we design the necessary control protocols that link the participants and the CMMC together.

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Mon Jan 10 18:40:57 GMT 1994