Floor Control for Large-Scale MBone Seminars

 

by: Radhika Malpani and Lawrence A. Rowe Computer Science Division - EECS University of California Berkeley, CA 94720-1776

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Abstract

The development of MBone videoconferencing tools has led to a large number of seminars being broadcast over the Internet. Most MBone seminars have little remote participation. One reason might be the absence of good floor control mechanisms. This paper describes a tool we developed, called the Questionboard, that implements floor control to facilitate question asking in large-scale MBone seminars. The qb protocol is described including the mechanisms used for reliable transmission of data and the floor control and crash recovery protocols.