A Multipoint Communication Model for the Web

The thesis presents a web based multipoint communication model which differs from the multimedia conferencing model defined by ITU-T T.120 series of recommendations. The T.120 series are built on top of OSI Transport layer, and are suitable for real-time conferences. For applications that need universal access instead of stringent real-time constraints imposed by audio and video conferencing, the model presented here is easier and lighter. We built a layer of multipoint control on top of HTTP sessions or connections by use of cookies. This model can be easily implemented by attainable, inexpensive server side scripts like PHP. It uses refresh mechanism of the Web to facilitate periodical message exchanges between a Web server and its clients. Not only text messages can be exchanged in our model, but graphic and any messages that can be posted to the web server can also be exchanged. A few applications, such as go games, dynamic chat rooms, and whiteboards are also presented to demonstrate the rich contents that this model is able to handle.