University College London C1 GB

GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH C DE

Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique C FR

Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan C SE

University of Oslo C NO

Rechenzentrum U Stuttgart C DE

TELES C DE

All project reports have been submitted as required in the contract. The second cost claim, for the period 1 June 1996 to 31 May 1997, was submitted on the 2 July 1997.

The components of the Project deliverable D2 MERCI Software II were largely delivered on the public web server by the due date, 28 February 1997. The deliverable software was completed following the work done to provide for the major demonstration mounted by the project at JENC’8 in Edinburgh, May 1997 and was then put onto the public server (http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/merci/). Due to delay in receiving Peer Reviews, the formal submission to the Commission was not made prior to the end of this reporting year.

We have requested the inclusion in the project of the Communication Research Centre (CRC) in Canada, having submitted a revised Project Plan in October 1996.

We have continued to hold regular bi-weekly conferences over the MBone. Project meetings have been held at TELES, Berlin in September 1996; UCL, London in December 1996; and INRIA, Sophia Antipolis in April 1997. The minutes of all these conferences have been delivered with the relevant Progress Reports.

All private project information, management and other reports are held on a private web server.

Participation in, co-ordination with, and influencing of, the IETF are very important activities in the MERCI project. We regularly attend the multimedia conferencing and security sessions of the IETF. We are key members of the MMUSIC group on conference control, and the Audio Video Transport group. Through the MERCI activities, we ensure that relevant European practices are fully compatible with the IETF ones - in fact in some areas, like conference control, conference invitation, and encryption key distribution for secure conferencing, we largely set the standards. We are participating in the new initiative to standardise multimedia server interfaces. In the security area, GMD and UCL are particularly strongly involved both from the MERCI and ICE-TEL perspectives. We are collaborating to ensure that the facilities being provided under MERCI fit into the IETF framework - but also can be used with the ICE-TEL infrastructure. From all our work we want to be sure that the standards used in the MERCI project have a world-wide compatibility.

Through the IETF we retain also good collaboration with ISI, UCB and LBL - who are responsible for major US multimedia conferencing initiatives.

Reports on all the IETF meetings we have attended are available through Scimitar and are referenced in A.9 Dissemination activity and plans.

At the IRTF meeting associated with the 38th IETF meeting in Memphis, UCL was represented at the meetings on reliable multicast.

TELES attended several meetings of the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium. At Gaithersburg in September there were H 324 Interoperability trials and at Oregon in October for the Forum.

TELES attended the meetings at in September/October at Eibsee (ITU SG 15), Ismaning (ITU SG 8) and in Munich for the T.120-Report. Representatives of TELES also attended the March ITU SG16 meeting in Geneva and the May meeting in Edinburgh.

INRIA worked with the W3C to prepare/participate in the RTMW workshop. Mark Handley, Jon Crowcroft (UCL), and Jean Bolot (INRIA) were the representatives for MERCI.

Roy Bennett attended a MANICORAL meeting on 17 September at Delft. We have received a report from MANICORAL entitled "Heuristic Evaluation of MERCI, Feb 1997". Andreas Rozek spent a week in at RAL discussing and installing an early version of the TeleDraw software.

UCL attended meetings of the UK Multimedia National Support Centres (MNSCs) held at Glasgow University in November and at UCL in February.

We have continued liaison with the ICE-TEL project, since any secure conferencing must use the same infrastructure as is provided in ICE-TEL. The fact that GMD is the Co-ordinating partner in ICE-TEL, and that both GMD and UCL are the main players in security on MERCI, ensure that there is good compatibility and collaboration between these two projects. GMD has specifically collaborated with ICE-TEL to determine the details of the security infrastructure and has conducted joint tests of SCUA with them.

Full details of these activities are given in A.9 Dissemination activity and plans - Publications below.

ICIP 96: INRIA have made a presentation.

Networld+Interop Paris 96: INRIA have made a presentation.

RTMW 96: INRIA have made a presentation.

Mednet96: UCL presented a paper on the Surgery Demonstration Workpackage to the Mednet96 conference at Brighton in October.

UNINETT: The MERCI team at UiO delivered a half-day course on Internet multimedia real-time communication at the annual conference of the Norwegian academic network (UNINETT).

NetWorkshop 25: Project staff delivered two papers at NetWorkshop 25 in Belfast, 25-27 March.

JENC8: Peter Kirstein presented a paper on the project at the JENC8 conference in Edinburgh, 12/14 May.

Networld+Interop: Colin Perkins attended the Networld+Interop conference in Las Vegas in May to present a paper describing the MBone multicast of the Globecom'96 conference.

Managing, Delivering and Supporting Lecture Room Services for the Multimedia Age: UCL attended this workshop held by the JISC Advisory Group on Computer Graphics (AGOCG) at Loughborough University on 28 April and made the case for more use of the MERCI tools in teaching.

Videoconferencing Strategy consultation meeting: Peter Kirstein made a presentation to this meeting held by UKERNA in London on 9 May.

CeBit: RUS presented the MERCI project at the CeBit in Hanover.

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Nobel Prize ceremony: The MERCI team at KTH participated in a direct transmission of the Nobel Prize ceremony and remote conference sessions with the laureates at the banquet at the Stockholm City Hall which was shown on Swedish television

JENC8: A major demonstration was made by MERCI at JENC. UCL demonstrated high quality conferencing and a new gateway tool which allows access to conferences via low speed links such as ISDN-2, GMD demonstrated the SCUA software and UiO presented a seminar from Oslo showing high quality video. MERCI sent 8 staff to the conference and made a noticeable impression.

TEN34 launch: UCL provided support for the use of the MERCI tools at the TEN34 project launch in Cambridge on 20 May and participated in their demonstration.

OPENNET 96: RUS held an MBone Tutorial at this Internet conference for the German chapter of Internet Society in November which explained and demonstrated the MERCI tools.

Globecom'96: A UCL team from the project multicast the Globecom'96 keynote speech and Internet mini-conference on 19/21 November from London.

UNINETT: The MERCI team at UiO had an information booth demonstrating software and showing usage scenarios. People from the MERCI team were responsible for transmitting the UNINETT conference on the MBone and for setting up for a remote talk from Holland to the conference.

CERN lectures: UiO assisted a group from CERN in transmitting a lecture series from CERN to universities in Norway and Finland using the MERCI tools.

Videoconferencing Strategy consultation meeting: A demonstration was made of the MERCI tools.

USENIX: Isidor Kouvelas of UCL presented a paper to the USENIX conference at Los Angeles in January and then visited ISI for technical discussions.

The objective of this workpackage is to provide high quality multimedia components to meet the conferencing needs of diverse users over a variety of platforms. Work has therefore focussed on improving the quality of the components, and on increasing the range of platforms on which they can be run.

INRIA and UCL have enhanced their tools (FreePhone and Rat) significantly over the past 12 months. Enhancements common to both tools include:

• The RTP payload format for redundant audio transmission has been changed, to allow for greater flexibility. The new format is moving through the IETF standardisation process, and has been adopted by a number of other audio tools, both freeware and commercial.
• The tools now handle high frequency sampling and high precision (16 bit) coding.
• Many bug fixes and improvements (silence detection, adaptive playout for better jitter compensation, etc).

Enhancements specific to RAT include:

• Support for private sessions using DES encryption has been added. This is compatible with RFC1889, and has been shown to interoperate with the LBL vat audio tool.
• A number of receiver-based packet loss repair schemes have been evaluated. The use of packet repetition with linear fading has been adopted since this gives good performance at low cost.
• Support for the LBL conference bus has been added. This allows for trading of the audio device between multiple instances of RAT (and/or vat), and voice switching of video in a vic session.
• RAT can now operate as an audio transcoder and mixer. This allows for the gatewaying of audio session between a multicast group and a unicast (eg: dialup) link. In addition, the encoding of the audio data can be changed, to reduce the bandwidth requirements of a stream. This is of use in a number of interworking scenarios.
• The RTCP processing code has been significantly revised resulting in much better conformance with RFC1889. In addition, RAT implements RTCP timer reconsideration, an experimental feature designed to improve scaling to very large multicast sessions (tens of thousands of participants).

The latest version of RAT is now release 3.0.23.

Enhancements specific to FreePhone include:

• Support for stereo coding has been added.
• FreePhone has been integrated with the MiMaze distributed game, with provision for 3D/spatial audio rendition synchronized with player position.
• A new rate control mechanism has been included which makes sure that FreePhone does not unfairly grab bandwidth in case of network congestion.
• A new adaptive redundancy control mechanism has been included which controls the amount of redundant information added (given bandwdith constraints provided by the rate control mechanism) to maximize quality perceived at destinations.

The latest version of FreePhone is now release 3.2.

INRIA has released Rendez-Vous, which is now available on a variety of Unix/Linux stations, with the Windows95 version in beta stage. Main changes since last year involve the two features specific to RendezVous, namely the scheduler and the layering scheme:

• The scheduler now does both audio/video synchronization and adaptive load shedding, meaning that it decodes/displays data at a rate which is a function of CPU load; if too little CPU is available, some data (e.g. video frames) might be dropped, however in all cases the goal is to optimize the quality rendered to the user given the CPU constraints. This provides much better quality to users with low power platforms.
• Layering involves both a layered coding scheme, based on a layered DCT scheme, and a layered transmission scheme. A specific transmission scheme has been examined, with good stability and convergence properties, and it is incorporated in RendezVous. Other schemes are still under investigation.

Teles has continued the implementation of a 32bit version of the Teles multimedia components for Windows95 (these components already existed in a 16 bit version for Windows 3.1). The work focused on the following:

• porting DLLs and the user interface
• CAPI for Windows NT
• writing drivers for the codecs
• testing the drivers.

The goal is to obtain a complete multimedia package for WindowsNT, which should be available as a commercial product in early 1998.

Work on stream synchronisation at INRIA is reflected in the scheduler of RendezVous (see above).

Synchronization between audio (RAT) and video (vic) was demonstrated at UCL. Work is ongoing on conference bus issues to make this easy in future releases of the tools and to allow the inclusion of tools from other sources.

RUS has developed TeleCanvas, a multicast-capable platform-independent shared whiteboard application entirely written in Java. After initial problems with Java thread synchronisation, user interface handling and networking there is now an implementation which features reliable multicast under semi-real-time constraints, access control for the whole session or individual pages and their contents and supports undo/redo even for operations issued by other session participants. Being written in Java, TeleCanvas is easily ported over a variety of platforms. Initial tests have been made on PC/Win95 platforms, but we have had some difficulties with the Java versions when running on a variety of Unix platforms.

The NTE text editor has been stable for quite a while now. Changes over the last year include adding DES encryption, porting NTE to Windows95 and fixing various bugs.

At the start of the MERCI project, the MERCI tools were essentially running on Sun Unix workstations. During the past year UCL has ported RAT to HP-UX, Linux and FreeBSD, and the port to Windows95/NT has been considerably improved. UCL has incorporated support for video transmission (using several framegrabbers) into the vic Win95/NT port. Free Phone and RendezVous have been ported to Linux and FreeBSD, and the port to Windows95 is in beta test mode. Unfortunately, the Windows versions run appreciably slower than the UNIX varieties. TeleCanvas is working over PC/Win95 and, to a degree, Unix platforms. The TelesVision line of products has been ported over to 32 bit implementations, in particular to WindowsNT platforms. NTE has been ported to Windows95.

The work carried out in WP3 is disseminated widely at standards meetings, conferences, etc. Some six presentations and papers have been accepted or submitted over the reporting period and these are listed in A.9 below.

Work in MERCI on redundant coding has been standardized in the IETF (see IETF document above). However, the efforts of the MERCI partners have also influenced the ITU-T standardization of teleconferencing systems in two important places

• the audio redundancy coding format for RTP was fed into the ITU-T process and has become a part of the H.323 / H.245 specifications
• the MERCI partners were involved in the definition of draft ITU-T Recommendation H.332 that defines the interactions between tightly coupled H.323 and loosely coupled MBone conferences.

The tools developed in WP3 have been made available on the Internet. Furthermore, some specific Web pages describing the tools and the ongoing work on high quality audio have been set up:

Also all deliverables are available from:

http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/merci/deliverables/

A list of user representation groups has been drawn up by UCL and these groups are in direct communication with individual MERCI partners. Validation activities are currently underway at CRC, UCL (Audio & Video Quality Assessment), RUS (MERCI seminars), GMD (Telekom), Shell (Thornton and Amsterdam), and KTH (Stanford Teaching).

Work on tool assessment and usability evaluation has been carried out at different partner sites and in conjunction with other projects, especially MANICORAL. The report from MANICORAL entitled "Heuristic Evaluation of MERCI, Feb 1997" has been reviewed and its contents evaluated.

One of the major issues was to improve integration of these results. It has proved difficult to get user assessments from different partner sites (e.g. after meetings and seminars); it was decided to step up requests and reminders for participants to fill in such assessments at the end of event. It has been considered to make completion of user feedback questionnaires a condition for closing tools being used, at least initially, until partners developed a 'habit' of completing questionnaires. Eventually, e-mail reminders could be sufficient to prompt partners. CRC and UCL have compiled a battery of questions for post-conference questionnaires to be completed by users which have been made available on the Web. The intention is that partners compose their own questionnaires from the battery as appropriate.

CRC carried out a series of controlled session which have been video taped. User activity on the different tools has been logged. Results from these trials were available in early 97.

Individual tools improvements include an improved user interface for the session directory tool (SDR) by UCL. Labels and explanations consistent with a model of an electronic TV listings guide. Evaluation of this new UI was completed in April. Usability of audio, video and synchronisation quality is undertaken as part of a field trial in which the tools are used for remote language teaching between UCL and another UK university. For this project, a prototype integrated user interface has been implemented and is also being evaluated as part of current field trials. UiO, UCL, RUS, and CRC are designing, based on their individual experience and needs, integrated interfaces of the MERCI tools for various meeting types (education, conference, presentation, business meeting, planning meeting, discussion group, etc.). The interfaces will be discussed among WP4 partners before presentation to other partners and potential users. UCL has been experimenting with Web-based tutorials and manuals to make tools more accessible to new users.

Oslo

• Lecture teaching: Touch-button graphical user interface used in 3 courses.
• Comparison to standard teaching methods: Unstructured interviews and unavailability of grades make it difficult to assess benefits of conference teaching.

RUS

• Seminar questionnaire: Partners are not completing assessment questionnaires.
• Flexibility of tools: suggestion to make tools similar to well-known applications.
• Evaluation of two new tools provided by the MERCI partners: the Netscape PlugIn written by UiO to provide Video on Demand and the MERCINARI tool written by CRC. Feedback included suggestions for improvements to the User Interfaces.

UCL

• Audio quality: Evaluation of various scale types.
• Video quality: Assessment of forced-choice selection.
• New design of SDR interface: TV-listing metaphor with linguistically appropriate user interface.
• Web-based tutorial: example of inclusion as on-line help of MERCI tools.
• ReLaTe trials: semi-structured interview is compared to questionnaire evaluation.
• New User Interface designed for SDR and an evaluation study completed. This work is described in a UCL research Note by Clarke and Sasse.
• A web-based tutorial for SDR
• Further work on the development of the RAT user interface.
• A Workshop was held in June to review progress, to define the contents of a final deliverable and to define and allocate work for the final quarter of the project.

CRC

• Videotaped sessions: controlled and free-style piloting.
• Data management: user activity logged and parsed for analysis.
• Feedback questionnaire: Databank of questions available for adapted use.
• User-satisfaction: feedback approach previously used for CBC trials.

HP-Lyon

• No trials since 1995: Remote teaching, in-house training over network.
• User support: Every aspect of system (installation, maintenance, etc.) requires diagnostic approach for implementation, which itself is urgently required.

HP-Bristol

• Technology issues: Bottleneck at various components; e.g., ATM, router.
• Firewall issues: In-house policies.
• Most serious concern: Packet loss in audio.
• Other available technologies: Comparative increase in requirements.
• Service management control: Monitor and manage tools individually.
• Novelty of service: Users are asking what the applications are meant to do/serve.

Shell

• Trials for remote business and project meetings between Shell Labs in Thornton (UK) and The Hague (NL) and UCL and Leeds University.
• Suggest light-pen for drawing instead of mouse.
• Requirement of availability of math symbols for chemists.
• Shared workspace tool which can postscript, bitmaps and sophisticated text facilities (symbols).

In WP5 of the MERCI project, the general aim is to implement a gateway that allows multimedia terminals (typically Windows or UNIX-based workstations) that are based on either of the two standards to interoperate seamlessly. Specifically, H.320-based end systems connected to the ISDN – these systems include typical conference room equipment – shall be able to communicate with MBone tools running on workstations connected to the Internet. The fundamental differences to be overcome include line-switched vs. packet-based transmission of audiovisual and control information, different control protocols, and the aforementioned different conferencing paradigms.

To achieve interoperability, the MERCI project partners have developed a gateway. Architecturally, the MERCI gateway is constructed of two gateways:

• an H.323 to MBone gateway as developed within the MERCI project
• an H.323 to H.320 gateway, developed in the EU project DIVINE and extended for MERCI

This subdivision not only allows us to leverage results from other European projects, but also has benefits from the market perspective. With the advent of H.323, the industry is converging towards using this standard for teleconferencing in corporate networks as well as in the Internet and as a basis for Internet telephony. This makes the MBone to H.323 gateway very valuable in its own right. The gateway functionality comprises

• converting the control protocols
• adapting transport protocol types
• providing a mapping between the two conferencing paradigms

These tasks are distributed across the two gateway components as follows:

The H.320 to H.323 gateway implements the entire H.320 protocol suite including access to basic rate ISDN lines. It is responsible for the conversion of packet based information transmission on the H.323 side to bit-stream oriented transmission on the H.320 side. Furthermore, this gateway translates the H.320 call setup and control protocols into the respective H.323 counterparts.

This gateway is implemented on a PC platform for Microsoft Windows 95. Internally, it consists of an instantiation of each a full H.320 and a full H.323 protocol stack – as they are found in terminals – with a bridging application residing on top of the two being responsible for receiving calls from either side and forwarding it to the other instead of locally answering the call. Besides translating the control protocols, the gateway accepts audio and video data packets from the MBone side and transmits the information as bit streams to the H.320 side and vice versa.

The H.323-MBone gateway implements the adaptation of the H.323 call setup and control protocols to the corresponding MBone protocols (if available) and provides new mechanisms for mapping the functionality where no MBone counterparts exist.

The H.323-MBone gateway uses a similar internal structure to the H.320-H.323 gateway; however, it is currently implemented on two workstations rather than integrated on a single one. A PC running Windows 95 is used for the H.323 side – to re-use the H.323 protocol stack of the H.323-H.320 gateway while the MBone part is implemented on a SPARCstation under the Solaris 2.5 operating system.

On the PC side, a simple client accesses the H.323 protocol stacks and forwards the messages received from the H.323 to the workstation using a simple RPC-style mechanism on top of a TCP connection. By this mechanism, it also receives messages to be sent via H.323 from the workstation and forwards them accordingly.

The actual protocol converter of the gateway runs on the workstation. It is based on the SIP/SDP implementation of SDR and accepts SIP messages from the MBone side and generates the corresponding H.323 call signaling and vice versa. Although the H.323-MBone gateway is in principle not required to access the media streams themselves (since H.323 and MBone applications use the same protocols and data formats), it optionally launches a multicast-to-unicast converter (MUC) to convert media packets multicast on the MBone into unicast packets on the H.323 side and vice versa (if this is required).

Figure 1 shows the overall architecture of the gateway implementation and its various components.

Both gateway components have been tested individually: they are capable of successfully translating call and control signaling and provide audio-visual communication between endpoints. However, some work remains to be done in order to integrate them to form a full H.320-MBone gateway. Further work items include the integration of both H.323-MBone gateway components into a single system (potentially a PC running Solaris 2.5) and the integration of means to detect that an MBone terminal has terminated a call (by parsing the media control streams for packets indicating this). Finally, the conference control protocol SCCP developed in WP8 needs to be integrated into the gateway – for reliable detection of call termination on both ends, for providing elaborate conference control mechanisms, and for exchanging capability information about the involved systems.

Issues for further study beyond the MERCI project comprise mixing audio and (remotely or automatically) selecting the video feed to be forwarded from the MBone to the ISDN, the integration of loosely-coupled conferences into H.323 according to Recommendation H.332, and the provision of more elaborate security mechanisms in the gateway.

Most WP5 partners have installed and started testing the Teles H323/Mbone G/W. Currently both the H323/Mbone g/w and the H.320/H.323 g/w have been provided.

The audio mixer/transcoder is now an integral part of RAT. It works as an RTP transcoder/mixer in which RTP packets received from a multicast group are transcoded into a user specified format. The transcoder can work with encrypted streams. The multicast capable server mixes multiple sources and the result is transmitted unicast to the client at the remote site. Currently six encoding/decoding methods are supported by the audio transcoder: PCM, DVI, GSM, LPC, L16 and redundancy.

The Video filter/transcoder is adopted from the video gateway engine developed at UC. Berkeley. Two operations are applicable: passing through or filtering by reducing frame-rate or transcoding (JPEG to H261, NV to H261)

An sdr relay server has been developed which listens for session announcements on a well known multicast address and passes SAP packets to the remote unicast client. It can also pass cached session announcements to the remote site to speed the delivery of announcements.

A user interface is provided on the gateway client to allow the user to invoke services from the relay server. The MERCI tools can be started from sdr on the client as in a multicast-enabled host.

Experience has shown, however, that it is difficult to control such an Mbone set-up for several reasons:

• while existing monitoring tools principally offer all the information required for MBone management, they work on request and observe a single site or path (between two endpoints) only. It is up to a human to invoke the proper commands and collect their output in order to determine a failure and the reason for any misbehaviour.
• routers and workstations at different sites are being managed by several individuals (usually, even more than an at a single site) - this usually requires the co-ordination of a group of people.

Within the MERCI set-up, audio and video quality is now mainly limited by the capacity of LANs (UCL is therefore upgrading their LANs to 100 Mbps Ethernet) and the multimedia workstations.

One serious problem we have experienced is the limited amount of ATM equipment at some MERCI sites and the fact that the network services are often not under MERCI control. As a result, failures in components have sometimes taken a long time to repair; this has resulted in two sites having no access to the JAMES network for several months.

Another problem is that the link between CRC and RUS has not been regarded as a JAMES link by the JAMES consortium. This has led to problems both in obtaining the current routing and having satisfactory availability on that channel.

At present the whole Mbone in Europe is suffering from a lack of European coordination.

As part of a consistent programme of installing adequate measurement facilities, UCL has introduced both some tools written inside the MERCI programme and some from outside. They are going to install state of the art monitoring and management software (HP-NetMetrix), and to gain experience with existing measurement tools; there has been also effort in developing a monitoring tool for distributed measurement and visualisation of real time traffic flow parameters.

Progress has been made on distributed measurement of real time traffic (RTP) flows on all the sites participating in wide area multimedia conferencing. Packet headers were recorded and further analysed in order to derive flow parameters (loss, inter-arrival times, delays). The monitoring activity so far was restricted to particular multicast groups. UCL will act as a management station and for this reason an initiative is starting of using the HP-NetMetrix and installing probes at different LAN segments locally and in the wide area. Those are Ethernet probes using the RMON standard and proprietary extensions to allow for monitoring up to the application layer. There are plans of using ATM probes when those become available, for monitoring the traffic levels on the wide area ATM PVCs.

Additionally, MultiMON, a new MBone management and diagnostics tool is under development by the Communications Research Center (CRC) in Ottawa Canada. The tool has been released recently and is going to be presented at the IETF in Munich. It monitors and displays the IPmulticast traffic on a network segment. MultiMon identifies traffic by type and a user can join any session that it locates. MultiMon also allows recording and analysis of the RTCP traffic from a particular multicast group stream to assist in QoS diagnostics.

The Department of Computer Science has a large amount of IP traffic flowing over OC3 links therefore we are considering deploying the OC3MON platform for statistics collection and real-time information on traffic levels on the WAN links. RUS has implemented an OC3MON (using a Pentium PC) and tested that device in the context of a master thesis. All the wide area multicast (IP in IP) traffic uses OC3 link before entering the JAMES Network.

Work at INRIA has focused on "network measurements". In particular, they have obtained measurement traces of the delay and loss processes of audio packets over the MBone. The statistical analysis shows that the delay process is well approximated by a constant+gamma distribution, and that the loss process is well approximated by simple Markovian models. Results for the delay have been used to design a better playout adjustment scheme (this does jitter compensation) for FreePhone. Results for the loss process have been used to:

• predict the gain in performance obtained with redundant coding, and
• design a very efficient adaptive redundancy control mechanism.

This work has been extended recently to consider the delay and loss processes of multiple streams sent in parallel; results of the analysis (still ongoing) will be useful to design efficient schemes for layered coding.

INRIA has also done some work in the area of "network technologies". They have setup an IPv6 testbed, are connected to the 6Bone, and are porting their tools over IPv6. They have also started working on integrating seamlessly satellite connections in the Internet, and have used these to provide high bandwidth links (first successful test with UCL on June 3).

An early RSVP pilot is starting to be formed within UCL to test the operation of the protocol and how flows of real time multicast traffic are affected when reservations are in place in terms of delay and packet loss. After the protocol has been adequately tested locally there are plans to deploy it in the WAN environment on the edges of the PVC provided by the MERCI/JAMES Project. Currently the work depends on the ISI release4 of RSVP, the implementation by CISCO, plans include deploying Sun's early release of RSVP/CBQ for Solaris, and an implementation of RSVP by Precept for Windows NT.

UCL has completed, and started deploying, a filtering and transcoding gateway which is fundamental to allow users at sites with low capacity access like ISDN to join high quality Mbone conferences. This gateway does audio mixing, video filtering and transcoding; it can also support both rate limiting ans running SDR session announcement. This gateway is now in regular use. Amongst other advantages, it allows home users with only 64 or 128Kbps to access MERCI sites to participate in conferences. Without the whole conference being reduced to their speed and quality. The gateway will be delivered as part of D3. UCL has also started testing the H.320 - Mbone Gateway from TELES, which will allow them to bring that class of workstation into Mbone conferences. We intend to deliver this gateway also as part of D3.

The existing TELES.Vision product has been extended to operate over PSTN and is available since the beginning of this year. After finishing several modules, e.g. IMTC H.324, Interoperability events have been attended to verify the standards compliance of the implementation.

The good progress in the IETF on unidirectional IP and the generous provision by Eutelsat of an uplink at INRIA to a 2Mbps channel, have made possible the deployment of multicast conferencing tools over DBS. Eutelsat gave a presentation at the Project meeting at INRIA in April of this year and have loaned 5 PC receiver boards to interested partners, namely UCL, GMD, UiO, KTH, and RUS. The link has been successfully demonstrated and will be further used to test the efficacy of the techniques where there is a demand for asymmetric interactions such as the delivery of lectures with limited responses or questions from a distributed audience.

A new version of the UCL conference recorder and player (MMCR) has been prepared and will be released as part of deliverable D3. An evaluation of the software was carried out as part of WP4; this identified some problems and providing suggestions for making the software more usable. We are analysing these comments, to see which we can incorporate in future releases.

A report is being prepared to develop a taxonomy and evaluation framework of multimedia servers. The reason for this is the huge variation in functionality, scalability, capacity and standardisation. Both the academic and commercial markets are currently being flooded with various solutions, some of which will be evaluated and described in this document. The server taxonomy report will be published at the time of the D3 deliverable.

The recorder and player now support RTPv2 data. RTPv2 data is now recorded in such a way that playback can be based on a combination of the receiver timestamps and the original sender timestamps; this removes some of the errors caused by a combination of use only of sender timestamp and network delay on the data during recording. RTCP session messages are also recorded enabling original source identification during playback. Additionally, the playback mechanism was enhanced to support redundant audio in addition to the other audio formats.

We have installed the Precept IP/TV server software for evaluation, but are awaiting the latest release (v1.6). Previous installation of the StarWorks-TV video server on an NT platform was successful, but could not interwork with the RTP based conferencing tools since it uses proprietary coding formats and protocols.

Playback and recording of encrypted streams have also been made available. To be able to view the data during playback, one must supply the encryption key used when the recording occurred.

A Graphical User Interface (written in Java) was added to the system and a new server was written in Java replacing the previous server written in Tcl. The GUI is totally independent of the server. Following an initial evaluation of the JAVA user interface at UCL, MMCR has been released to MERCI partners for evaluation.

The provision of new functionality was the main target of the work since the first internal release. Time has been spent on bug-fixes and minor upgrades and work is now progressing on the development of editing capabilities starting with "Fast-forward" and "Re-wind" features. The release in the deliverable D3 will allow the user to perform fast-forward, rewind and random access operations during playback.

Within the MERCI project, conference control and setup functionality has been developed for the following purposes:

• initiating Mbone conferences
• coupling ITU-T and Mbone conferences via the gateway developed in WP5
• exercising conference control of a running Mbone conference irrespective of any coupling with ITU-T end systems
• local co-ordination of several applications comprising a conferencing end-point

To accomplish these tasks, a number of protocols have been defined, including SDP/SAP/SIP for Mbone conference initiation, and SCCP for control of running Mbone conferences and interworking with ITU-T conferences.

The session description protocol (SDP) has been further refined. The current draft is draft-ietf-mmusic-sdp-03. This specification is currently undergoing "last call" in the IETF, and is expected to be submitted to the IESG for approval as a proposed standard in the near future. Major changes in this draft include a simplification of the scheduling features, and addition of a number of attributes to handle new media formats.

The session announcement protocol (SAP) has undergone further development. At the end of the reporting period draft-ietf-mmusic-sap-00 was the current specification. There are a number of open issues with this protocol, for example the use of an IPv4 address is somewhat limiting, as is the limitation that SAP may only carry SDP packets. Despite these open issues, and in view of its wide use, SAP will be submitted for last call as an experimental RFC in the near future.

After this publication, a number of changes are under consideration for a future version of SAP. These include the addition of a payload type field (to allow SAP to carry payloads other than SDP). The addition of a payload type field causes a number of complications. For example, systems which currently parse SAP/SDP packets will be required to understand all other formats carried by SAP in order to perform multicast address allocation (since SAP/SDP is the means of allocating multicast addresses). There are a number of ways by which this problem may be solved, of which the splitting of SAP into two portions: address allocation chunk, and payload chunk, was the preferred option. This area clearly requires more development, and is a subject for further work.

Further work (draft-ietf-mmusic-sap-sec-00) has defined the mechanism whereby a session announcement can be encrypted to provide for authentication of the announcer and privacy for the participants. This work is being conducted under the auspices of the IETF, and is expected to be submitted as an Internet standard in future.

The MERCI defined session invitation protocol (SIPv1) has been merged with the SCIP proposal from Columbia University, to produce SIPv2. The resulting protocol is similar in many respects to SIPv1, but allows for the use of TCP as a transport in addition to UDP, and has a more HTTP like syntax (the old SIPv1 syntax is still accepted as an abbreviation of this). The result is a protocol which is considerably easier to implement in conjunction with a web server, and fits well with HTTP and RTSP.

The combination of SDP and SAP has achieved widespread acceptance, as a standard means of specifying and announcing multimedia conferences. These protocols have been implemented in the MERCI SDR tool (which has now completely replaced the older LBL SD tool on the Mbone), and a number of compatible tools both commercial and freeware.

There has also been acceptance of SIP, which fits very well with the RTSP proposal for control of multimedia servers. Since RTSP is backed by a large number of commercial organisations, it is expected that both it and SIP will be widely deployed in future.

For the implementation of the conference control functionality, a layered approach has been chosen: SCCP provides mechanisms for keeping state information consistent among a set of conference participants. SCCP runs on top of a reliable multicast protocol: MTP-2. On top of SCCP - which is virtually free of any semantics - resides an SCCS (Simple Conference Control Semantics) entity that defines the actual interpretation of tokens and variables provided by SCCP. This combination provides tightly coupled conference control for those Mbone sessions which require it, and allows for interworking with ITU-T conferences, using the gateway developed for MERCI WP5.

The shared state information base comprises a participants list, any number of tokens for arbitrating access to shared resources, so-called application sessions - sets of applications co-operating in a conference – and variables (that are at the free disposal of SCCS). This set of information is termed the conference context. One SCCP entity in the conference acts as the receptionist. It is responsible for accepting or rejecting newcomers and passes the current conference state to newly accepted members. Finally, SCCP offers a generic message passing service for use by SCCS.

For providing its services, SCCP relies on MTP-2 as the underlying multicast transport protocol. In particular, the current version of SCCP requires global sequencing of transmitted messages. Furthermore, SCCP benefits from MTP-2 offering recovery from packet loss and other network errors.

SCCS defines the type of conference (including meeting style, floor control, access control to the conference and to conference resources, etc.) and thus defines the conference policy. SCCS implements the services by defining semantics of SCCP variables (e.g. capabilities of applications, rendezvous information for application sessions) and tokens (e.g. chairperson, conference floor), by controlling the invocation of SCCP service primitives, and by exchanging SCCS-specific messages (if needed).

There can be many various conference policies which are then implemented as different SCCS entities. The most trivial example is the Null Policy, granting direct access to the underlying conference control protocol: such a "policy" would only use the membership information for the conference and the application sessions without imposing any restrictions on actions taken in the conference or on manipulation of the conference context. This policy may be used for modelling point-to-point conferences via the gateway in order to provide the Mbone side with services to explicitly tear down a conference. The other SCCS entity currently available implements the conference model defined in ITU-T-Recommendation T.124.

On conference startup, the policy is selected by the user initiating the conference information received from an invitation (via SIP) or conference announcement (via SAP). The necessary formats for representing SCCP/SCCS information in SDP are being defined.

Figure 2 Implementation Architecture of the MERCI Conference Management System

Figure 2 shows the architecture of the Conference Management System (CMS) as implemented in the MERCI project. Two Applications, e.g. an audio and a video application, and a conference controller, which allows the user to join and leave conferences, are connected to the CMS via some local inter-process communication mechanism -- the message bus (see below). All three entities communicate with the SCCS entity via protocol translators called plug-ins to exchange control information. This approach allows to orchestrate applications with different local control protocols. The entire CMS is implemented in C++ with base classes being provided that allow simple addition of new plug-ins as well as policies.

The specification for interfacing a specific implementation of the Session Announcement Protocol (SAP) and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) - such as SDR - to the CMS is in progress. SDR allows to select a conference from the set of all announced or ongoing conferences in the Internet, typically launch the necessary applications (as described in the session announcement). However, the CMS potentially is expected to be a persistent entity as well and consequently must not be instantiated several times. This integration of SDR and the CMS is a work item that requires further study.

As an adjunct to this, MERCI partners have been involved in the definition of draft ITU-T Recommendation H.332 that defines the interactions between tightly coupled H.323 and loosely-coupled MBone conferences.

Work has begun on the development of a local conference coordination bus, or message bus, by which a number of conferencing applications may communicate. This work is required for the implementation of the tightly coupled wide-area conference control.

The message bus definition is building on the CCCP protocol developed previously in the MICE project, and on the LBL conference bus as deployed in the vic/vat/rat applications. The development of this message bus is a joint work between the MERCI project, and groups at ISI and Berkeley.

A number of experimental conference coordination systems have been tested, to provide lip-sync between audio and video and for remote control of the RAT application. This has lead to a clear definition of the message passing interface, and some ideas for message formats. Further experimentation and testing is in progress.

UCL made modest improvements to its conference rooms early in the year which were adequate for small-scale activity, but has been waiting most of this year for the delivery of new equipment to fully renew them. These upgrades are now complete and we expect to find it easier to deliver high-quality seminars from UCL in the next series this autumn. UCL also plans to make a number of improvements to the User Interface of the conference room controls, following more user feedback.

The four conference rooms of the electronic classroom type in Norway have been used for teaching several full semester courses both during the autumn and spring terms. These conference rooms are located at Norwegian universities and regional colleges. The conference room at the University of Oslo has also been used for some MERCI meetings and seminars demonstrating interworking with other MERCI software.

The electronic classrooms are equipped with high quality audio equipment including echo cancellers and ceiling- mounted microphones. The classrooms are also equipped with high quality video equipment including a back projecting video projector, two monitors and several voice activated cameras. IP audio and video transmission is either multicast or unicast based using high quality (7KHz) audio as well as high speed H.261 encoded video. The shared electronic whiteboard part of the electronic classroom is based on a separate back-projecting video projector where the user may draw on the whiteboard using a dedicated light-pen. The shared workspace software used features the traditional drawing tools (straight lines, arrows, circles, free hand drawing, etc). An additional innovative feature of this shared workspace tool is the ability to display Web-pages on the whiteboard in such a way that the user may annotate on top of the Web-page using the before mentioned tools. This feature is used during teaching by lecturers, both to display Web pages with their own teaching material, and to show students relevant external Web-sites. In addition to supporting IP-based audio and video communication the electronic classrooms supports H.320 over ISDN.

Work has been undertaken to improve the audio and video tools and to add support for redundancy during the past year. Also work has been undertaken to improve the electronic whiteboard by developing a new pen for the electronic whiteboard. Work has also been done to integrate better echo cancellation technology.

As mentioned elsewhere in this report a company (New Learning AS) was formed in early 1997 to commercialise the electronic classroom system. For the commercial version of the electronic classroom system a revised implementation of the shared workspace tool as well as the audio and video tools is under way. The new version of the electronic classroom system will be based on Windows/NT in contrast with the previous version which was based on Unix. It is expected that this new software will be released in the early autumn when the first electronic classrooms delivered as commercial products are projected to be delivered. The company is also revising and redesigning some of the hardware which has been part of the early electronic classroom systems and has taken over the development of a new pen for the electronic classroom.

Information on the electronic classroom and conference room system can be found on the Web at http://munin.uio.no.

As the secure SAP specification has not been finalised yet, a provisional version of SDR with security functionality will be delivered initially.

The mail-based solution, SCUA (Secure Conferencing User Agent), was delivered and has been well accepted by the peer reviewer. The SCUA offers authentication and encryption along the ICE-TEL lines as well as PGP. The message format is compliant with SAP. Further work is required on key distribution. It is also necessary to merge SCUA with other email systems.

The TELES H.323 terminal implementation has been the basis for the gateway. Major parts of the security mechanisms recommended by H.235 have already been added to the terminal implementation though work on the H.323 itself is still underway. The audio/video streams can already be encrypted with all relevant symmetrical algorithms. As the standards at IETF and in the ITU are still evolving, an implementation of security mechanisms in the gateway is not yet available.

Commercially available servers, suitable for MBONE-type applications, were investigated and evaluated regarding their security levels and functions. A server testbed was built up based upon a commercial AST Pentium server running Windows NT 4.0. This platform can also run UNIX.

INRIA has prepared a seminar on Seamless integration of satellite links in the Internet, scheduled in late 1997. This seminar will be broadcast using satellite transmission and new protocols defined in an IETF group (UDLR) over the past year (INRIA is actually heading this group). The satellite link has been tested over the summer 1997, so things are now in place.

The WWW based seminar booking form at RUS has been extended to cover the current year. It may be accessed at URL:

UCL has created a web-based form for user responses to the Seminars. It may be accessed at URL:

MERCI has tested and used its own tools at the biweekly networked multimedia project meetings as described in item A 11.1 of the Project Plan for this workpackage. While initially being transmitted over the normal production MBone, we are now using the high-quality set-up (as described in the WP6 section) whenever possible. Test sessions were held prior to the actual seminar in order to set up the high quality configuration and get it running. We have suffered from intermittent problems in multicast access - mainly due to the network problems at partner sites

The workshop in Interventional Uro-Radiology and Endourology demonstrating novel, minimal invasive surgery techniques was held, as planned, at the Middlesex Hospital in London on February 20, 1997. It was transmitted from the Middlesex Hospital by analogue links to UCL Computer Science Dept. where it was digitised and multicast to Glasgow, Gothenburg, Stockholm and Stuttgart. Two operations from the Sahlgrenska Hospital in Gothenburg were received and sent back to the Middlesex after digital-to-analogue conversion. The event, demonstrating improved technical quality over that multicast by the MICE project in November 1994, featured the use of increased bandwidth, encryption and digital recording on the UCL multimedia server, MMCR. All participating sites were given the encryption keys out-of-band via email and the event was not publicised in SDR.

RUS set up the broadband ATM connections to CRC, but at the last moment these did not function, so CRC was unable to participate. An Mbone station was set up in a presentation room in order to show the transmission to invited medical people and the team participated in the dry run, the actual Surgical Workshop itself and a series of post mortem meetings.

All sites contributed videotape recordings of the event, the setup and the environment which KTH are editing into a video tape deliverable to follow.

UCL has produced a report of the event, a copy of which is included in Annex 7.

Assessment of the suitability of MERCI/ MBone conferencing tools for. This was a distributed Telekom group working in both Berlin and Darmstadt. Use was made of various internal and inter-site networks.

Installation and test of MBone tools in a. This was a Telekom group in Darmstadt working together with GMD at Darmstadt (via an ATM link).

In both scenarios, the tools were judged to be of good quality. More details can be found in the Internal Deliverable report in Annex 7. The areas that users found limiting in Mbone/Internet conferencing were:

• application sharing (for importing and exporting documents and joint doc work), a feature available in most commercial (ISDN) conferencing products.
• security problems in the Internet, considered important enough for commercial companies to make them often choose to use ISDN conferencing, even where this means a loss of quality or features.

The plan was for a second series of trials to begin in February. These did not take place for the following reasons:

• there was a major re-organization at Telekom with target groups dissolved and/or given new tasks/new offices.
• Telekom were basically satisfied with achievements - they saw no major problems left, but also no pressing need for every day use of teleconferencing.
• For desktop conferencing, the users felt that their project work would not benefit from ANY kind of teleconferencing available today, so that they felt no incentive to resume trials; additionally they felt there was no technical incentive either as they simply trusted that the new tools were improved.
• For conference rooms, the decision to set up more of the type used for the trials is still pending. This room is essentially used for demonstrations only and Telekom had no resources available to update/upgrade demonstration facilities although we did suggest this more than once.
• one cannot guarantee to have the necessary Internet access, which is often restricted to e-mail and/or ftp only.
• Whilst conferencing tools may be well utilised in project work of a distributed team when a technology is agreed and set up for everyone at beginning of the project, we did not have a new, suitable project starting at the time.

These are some of the reasons given by those who took part in the early trials. We do not agree with all of them, but we have to accept this as a genuine User's viewpoint. We find it hard to understand why a group within a company such as Telekom is so passive and reserved on the use of modern conferencing.

Even if we take the position that some of the reasons given are not the true reasons, we are left with the inescapable conclusion that these people have currently lost their interest in videoconferencing and do not think they can benefit enough from it. Since the individual people have been very cooperative and interested in the past, we suspect they are still recovering from the major relocation and re-organisation and are reluctant to make yet more changes to their working practices at this time.

1. Java implementations (even those published by Sun) still contain numerous bugs - or contain threads which are improperly synchronized

Example:

We once had the situation where an image, which had been transferred from one site to another, could not be shown at the other site for unknown reasons. The transferred image could be proved to be correct, and debugging showed that Java's image rendering function was invoked with proper arguments - but nothing happened...

2. From time to time Sun makes substantial changes in their language or its runtime environment.

• in the beginning of 1997 a new event model was introduced which works completely different than that used before
• right now, Sun is proposing new components for graphical user interfaces due to the problems (and insufficiencies both in design and implementation) of their old "AWT" controls

1. Java applications cannot be expected to run on every platform.

• the width of graphically rendered text is improperly computed on some platforms - this leads to partially cropped message output
• mouse events are delivered with different "modifiers" on several platforms. E.g. sometimes, a "MousePressed" event does not contain information about which button (of the three available ones) was actually pressed

1. layout managers responsible for sizing and positioning of controls inside a window are extremely buggy leading to mangled window contents - here, a window resizing operation (done by the user) might help
2. Java applications cannot be expected to run under the next version of the runtime environment.

• "suddenly" (i.e., when moving from 1.1beta to 1.1final), opening a socket could take minutes because of blocking DNS requests
• "suddenly", multicast sockets did not work properly (they could not be used for both sending and receiving data simultaneously)

In the beginning, bug reports were sent to Sun - sometimes even containing example code that demonstrated the bug - but so far we have not even received confirmation of the reception of such a report. We therefore stopped reporting these errors in order to save the effort of constructing such reports.

While it might be worth dealing with Java, since it is a nice idea and is slowly moving towards a professional state, it is hard, even impossible, to predict the effort needed to write a professional application. In our case, the initial prototype of "TeleDraw" was cut down to a smaller "TeleCanvas" with fewer features which was then implemented first.

We have suffered intermittent problems in the technical set up of networks for use both in conferencing and in the delivery of seminars. These fall into three categories:

These are usually due to conflicts between the developmental networking needs of MERCI and the need to maintain normal networking in the institution in times of rapidly changing networking hardware and software. The Mbone used to run almost entirely over workstation-based routing software (mrouted), but is now increasing implemented in the normal Internet routers (Cisco PIM, etc).

The need to segregate the JAMES ATM links at each participating partner's site when demonstrating high-speed conferencing for applications such as seminars and the surgical workshop, has created great difficulty for those responsible for the networking. Initially we had to physically separate such links from the rest of the network infrastructure at each site; latterly we have deployed the filtering version of mrouted (3.9) and have had to learn to use the new software and to prove it's operation.

In the period of this review there has been no formal and little informal coordination between the sites which maintain the European Mbone. In the past those responsible for key sites would informally collaborate to solve problems and to improve connectivity. This activity has been sharply reduced, and, in the absence of formal and/or funded action, is likely to further diminish. This is very bad news for a project dedicated to the increased use of this network technology.

• The Human Collaboration and Communications group at Copenhagen Business School which is responsible for the assessment of the effects of the new technology on the working methods of the users.
• The AFRICAR project which uses visualisation tools to help in the interpretation and analysis of satellite data. The three project members communicate by e-mail and s-mail and meet normally once a year only. The data they use is now available from a common server. They wish to work with shared visualisation tools, including animations, as part of a multimedia conferencing environment.
• RAL is responsible for the design and eventual deployment of a shared visualisation tool. Initially they will develop the requirements and identify a suitable architecture. They have introduced the initial set of MERCI tools to the AFRICAR users
• The feedback from MANICORAL will influence the ongoing development of tools, especially the design of their user interface.

The main development work of the project is in the improvement of the tools and their transfer to other platforms, operating systems and networks. Therefore validation is an ongoing part of the project, not just a single activity. Here we rehearse our plans and report on progress to date.

The stated objectives of the project include:

• To validate the tools by their deployment in three Validation Exercises inside the project: A Seminar Series, some surgical workshops, some commercial trials.
• To validate the results by deploying the tools in two related Telematics projects: MANICORAL and COBROW.

We see four stages of verification:

1. The components are shown to work by being transferred to another MERCI partner who is able to mount and use satisfactorily the components - usually in conjunction with other MERCI components
2. We hold a bi-weekly multimedia project meeting. The second stage of verification is that the components work well when introduced into the weekly meetings.
3. We plan to demonstrate the MERCI tools as part of the Deliverables. We will use public conferences or exhibitions to demonstrate our Deliverables to the CEC (and others). This is a very harsh test on whether the components fit together and operate reliably. Since all of our components have to be demonstrated, this stage is an important milestone for them.
4. Finally, we will transfer the components to one of the validation workpackages. Here they will be hammered by people outside the project. Only when the results here are judged satisfactory, do we consider them ready for the demonstration phase - and even then any drawbacks are noted for use in further development of the components.

The validation which we have achieved so far is a mixture of that done within the project and that done by our users in the MANICORAL project.

MANICORAL has been using the tools and we have maintained close collaboration with them in the evaluation of the tools. In February of this year we received an Heuristic Evaluation of the tools (see Annex 7) after increased use of the tools by the AFRICAR project.

We have held 21 multimedia conferences and delivered 6 seminars during the past year. We have also multicast the surgical workshop in February 1997.

The conferences have been characterised by generally poor connectivity, despite the availability of JAMES links between some of our partners. The impossibility of integrating these high-speed links with the generally lower speed links to France and Canada have forced us to adapt to the lowest common denominator. We continue to overcome these problems, to some extent, by the use of tools resistant to the adverse network conditions. Network Text Editor (NTE) is always used to show the agenda, which is then interactively developed into the minutes; when connectivity declines temporarily, participants use NTE to communicate. The use of the Robust Audio Tool (RAT) and FreePhone, with redundant encoding for audio, has enabled us to continue to speak and be heard in conditions where loss would have prevented this otherwise. Since we have had Mpoll from CRC, we have used this multicast polling tool to record specific votes, such as agreement to the minutes of the last meeting, and to record general impressions of the quality of the conference.

Despite the provision of a web-form to allow on-line feedback from seminar participants, we have had limited feedback from non-project people attending those seminars which were put out over the general Mbone. Most of the seminars we have given have been over the MERCI Mbone, which we created initially by the physical separation of the JAMES ATM links and subsequently by use of filtering in the multicast routers. We presented a very successful high-quality seminar from UiO as part of the MERCI presence at JENC8 in Edinburgh. More Seminars are scheduled for October and November.

MERCI is a service provider to the other projects in the Telematics for Research sector. We provide the tools for multimedia conferencing, assist with their introduction and provide a secured conferencing environment for both workstations and PCs.

We have had close relations with MANICORAL, both as a user of our tools and as a project looking to us to help them in the development of their own shared visualisation tool. We keep in close contact with the ICE-TEL project to which we look for our secure conferencing infrastructure.

We have kept in contact with SCIMITAR which helps to fund our work on standardisation. Representatives have attended our project meetings and they are always welcomed to our networked conferences. MERCI has continued to be fully compliant with the deliverables publishing format requested by the ADVISER project.

Our tools have been used for the demonstration part of the ACTS project PROSPECT.

We have worked closely with JAMES to maintain and improve our connectivity and have provided JAMES with a series of user reports describing our experiences of using their links. The JAMES project has asked us to demonstrate their network facilities as part of their Annual Review as well as our own.

We provided tools and assistance to TEN-34 for the demonstration which they gave as part of their project launch in July.

We have registered to use the Web4Groups tools and are experimenting with the installation of them on our own server.

The Project Director and Project Manager of MERCI have attended all the scheduled Concertation meetings in Brussels, including the December Conference.

MERCI is demonstrating that adequate technology is available, and high quality advice can be brought to bear by applying the technology to three important applications:

• a Distance Learning seminar series (WP11)
• workshops in experimental surgery (WP12)
• trials under commercial conditions (WP13)

In each case the applications require audio, video and shared workspace.

The seminar series requires rugged regular use of the technology to a wide number of sites; the demands on the video and audio is high but not too stringent; there is a need to distribute slide and OHP material as part of the seminars. The capability for the tools to be put together in interesting and innovative ways has been demonstrated by the interface developed by the ReLaTe project for language teaching. We maintain our interest in and support of the development of such interfaces for new educational uses and are currently extending such an interface to the PC platforms.

The newer higher quality tools provided by MERCI meant that we were able to provide closer to the quality needed in the Surgery Workshop (WP12) held in February; the surgeons also commented on the improved audio quality. The use of a secure conferencing environment for this event ensured the confidentiality of the procedures and thus an approved audience. This is vital for many reasons - of which patient protection is an important one. The introduction of the multimedia server allowed us to store an encrypted recording for subsequent retrieval. This will increasingly provide an important improvement to the quality of such events as educational experiences by making recorded materials available.

In Germany GMD and Deutsche Telekom AG carried out commercial trials with MERCI tools at Telekom premises as part of WP 13. This work is described in the internal deliverable D13.1, available on the MERCI web server and included in Annex 7.

We must emphasise that the above practical uses of the technology, whilst they show validation of our approach, are not seen as real demonstrators. Some could be developed into full demonstrators, but we continue to evaluate results from the many project which use the tools to determine which variants and facilities will be most needed; hence our strong commitment to the user reports gathered by WP 4.

Through the IETF we retain also good collaboration with ISI, UCB and LBL - who are responsible for major US multimedia conferencing initiatives.

We are participating in the ongoing discussion in the Reliable Multicast Research Group. The development of Reliable Multicast Protocols is a matter of great interest to the project. UCL attended the meeting of the Group held in Memphis in April 1997.

TELES attended several meetings of the International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium. At Gaithersburg in September there were H 324 Interoperability trials and at Oregon in October for the Forum.

TELES attended the meetings at in September/October at Eibsee (ITU SG 15), Ismaning (ITU SG 8) and in Munich for the T.120-Report. Representatives of TELES also attended the March ITU SG16 meeting in Geneva and the May meeting in Edinburg.

INRIA worked with the W3C to prepare/participate in the RTMW workshop. Mark Handley, Jon Crowcroft (UCL), and Jean Bolot (INRIA) were the representatives for MERCI.

This server also has a password-protected private section used for Project Control and documentation.

There are local MERCI servers at partner sites:

KTH http://www.it.kth.se/labs/ts/MERCI/merci.html

and at our associate

The MERCI team at KTH participated in a direct transmission of the Nobel Prize ceremony and remote conference sessions with the laureates at the banquet at the Stockholm City Hall. This was shown on Swedish television.

RUS held an MBONE Tutorial at OPENNET 96 (an Internet conference for the German chapter of Internet Society) from 11th to 13th November which explained and demonstrated the MERCI tools

A UCL team from the project multicast the Globecom'96 keynote speech and Internet mini-conference on 19/21 November from London.

The MERCI team at UiO delivered a half-day course on Internet multimedia real-time communication at the annual conference of the Norwegian academic network (UNINETT). People from the MERCI team were responsible for transmitting the conference on the Mbone and for setting up for a remote talk from Holland to the conference. During the same conference they had an information booth demonstrating software and showing usage scenarios.

UiO assisted a group from CERN in transmitting a lecture series from CERN to universities in Norway and Finland using the MERCI tools.

MERCI gave a major demonstration at JENC. UCL demonstrated high quality conferencing and the new transcoding gateway tool, GMD demonstrated the SCUA software and UiO presented a seminar from Oslo showing high quality video. MERCI sent 8 staff to the conference and made a noticeable impression.

UCL provided support for the use of the MERCI tools at the TEN34 project launch in Cambridge on 20 May and participated in their demonstration.

The following seminars have been given:

No patents have been applied for during this period.

To the extent that the project is generic, we can discuss only the impact on telematic applications in general. In the particular education, training and health-care areas, the impact can be immense. In tertiary education, UiO and KTH are already putting on full courses and UCL plan to use the technology to assist in the teaching of a course in the Computer Science department in the next academic year. Hewlett-Packard are working with this project to gain an insight on how feasible it now is to organise technical training on a genuinely pan-European basis.

In the medical education field, University College London already has an integrated course across the three medical sites that have been part of their catchment area - hence the ease with which they have entered a larger British project, funded nationally, to provide surgical education embracing 6 universities and using SuperJANET. With the deployment of the JAMES links between partners across Europe, we have been able to use these, in conjunction with our good local infrastructure, to relay operations from an operating theatre in Sweden and a surgical workshop at UCL to sites across Europe. These operations were watched by doctors at that workshop, in seminar rooms at other hospitals and on individual workstations. The impact this will have for medical consultation will be immense as we are able increase the use of our improved tools over the JAMES and TEN’34 networks, incorporating higher quality video and audio, and to introduce better quality instrument data used by the medical practitioners. Because we have embraced lower levels of technology, namely ISDN through a new gateway service, we can also influence secondary health care - allowing medical consultation between the doctor's office and the hospital.

These arguments extend to other areas. It should be noted that the entry costs are not high. With the porting of the applications to high-end PCs, much larger numbers of users can use our technology without the need for high-performance workstations or expensive networks. Clearly the higher performance workstations, PCs, servers and networks will improve the facilities that can be offered. The economic justification is for further deployment is over-powering.

It is the policy of the EU, in the communications part of their programme, to pioneer the use of multimedia and of international standards; in international discussions it promotes the goal of international collaboration and co-operative working over high-speed networks. The MERCI concentration on standard hardware and software solutions for European-wide and international multimedia, collaborative working furthers both the EU dissemination policies and their aim to further developments that should lead to opportunities for profitable exploitation by European industry. The project continues to be a leading contributor in the field of multimedia conferencing to the international standards bodies of both the ITU and the Internet.

The project’s contribution to the competitiveness of industry is necessarily oblique since its objectives are to facilitate the use of the multimedia conferencing technology within the European research community. We do see the contribution being made in three main fields:

1. Most directly oriented to the industrial world is our work with Deutsche Telekom AG in Germany. The industrial trials, which we ran in Workpackage 13, were successful in their objectives and their technical success was as great as we had hoped. The lack of interest on the part of Deutsche Telekom in pursuing further trials does not invalidate the success of the first, but does emphasise that there are many issues other than the strictly technical efficacy which affect the deployment of new technology. We will publish the results of the trials in the commercial world, and continue to liaise with these users over time.
1. We expect that the benefits which have been gained from its use by such industrial research bodies as Shell Research and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, will move more slowly through to other branches of their operations. This will be a less direct contribution, but, over time, equally effective.
2. Through our work with non-commercial research bodies and other organisations, such as the hospitals involved in Work Package 12, we expect a gradual improvement in their efficiency and cost effectiveness. This should result from the ability to work closely with their peers throughout Europe, an effect which we have demonstrated already.

The improvement in the network infrastructure resulting from the investment in JAMES and TEN’34 has already helped to improve the quality of the services we can offer to these users.

We have identified European researchers as our major constituency and have an established base with the use of the conferencing technology by Shell Research, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, MANICORAL project (RE 1006) and UKERNA. We have discussed much of this in the preceding section, and more detail of this contribution is given in section A.2 Work done, within the workpackage descriptions.

One of the biggest problems of effectively managing the effort of such a large research programme as Telematics is the difficulty in ensuring that the many related and interlocking projects communicate with the Commission and with each other. Such communication needs to be made in a timely and appropriate manner without spending too much time and effort. The provision of projects to facilitate such communication, including MERCI and SCIMITAR, and the programme of Concertation meetings both confirm that this is recognised.

The effort and cost involved in setting up the various meetings needed for effective communication militate against its being done to the extent that it is needed when partners and projects are spread across the whole of Europe. If the multimedia conferencing tools now in use are deployed to the extent of saving a small proportion of this time and effort, the project will have made a major contribution to the activities of the sector domain. It is already making that contribution. MANICORAL and ICE-TEL are using the tools for regular meetings. Such use is increasing as the tools have become more sophisticated and are now available to the much larger user population which uses PCs rather than UNIX workstations.

There is direct involvement of SMEs on both sides of the Atlantic. TELES, one of the partners, is an SME; they are contributing strongly to the project in ways that directly impact their product plans - both on ITU terminals, and on Interworking Gateways. UiO, concentrating on Conference Rooms in the project, have started New Learning, a company to commercialise products partially financed by this work.

GMD is starting a company to commercialise its security products; these will be used in the security workpackage.

The project has a strong involvement with its designated users and has benefited already from their reactions to using the tools for conferencing.

Whilst some aspects of the MERCI work are easier to exploit nationally, the real benefit comes from the European dimension. It is very clear from the other European projects in which the partners are involved, that the international benefits are huge; we have a depth and regularity of content which is completely unavailable in the normal projects not using this way of working. It would have been quite impossible to make the rapid progress we have made in the project without the use of the technology; the European dimension is required by many of the applications, and avoids different developments becoming unable to interwork

At the start of the MERCI project, most of the partners already knew each other and had worked together on MICE where the use of interactive conferencing revolutionised the collaboration. MERCI, therefore, got off to a flying start with its use. With this experience we have been able to facilitate the collaboration of the partners in MANICORAL, a linked project, through making the conferencing tools available to them and to receive their comments and suggestions for improvements. The availability, and wide deployment, of this technology will continue to have an integrating effect that cannot yet be fully appreciated. This will be in full support of the information society in Europe and of the European Union policies. Moreover, we still maintain that the way that the multimedia technology plans to embrace most of the underlying network technologies has several important consequences:

• It is of use where application sites do not have the latest and most expensive communications infrastructures
• It can make good use of improved infrastructure (e.g. JAMES, TEN’34) now that they are available
• It has been a searching probe which has discovered weaknesses in the European communications infrastructure - even though it has been able to continue operations at reduced performance

B.1 For those projects whose contracts extend into next year please follow the following guide-lines. Use existing Project Programme forms where appropriate (see "Hands-out for the preparation of the Annex 1 - Project Programme to the Contract", available in electronic format on Web: http://www2.echo.lu/telematics)

With only 4 months of the project remaining, our future plans are necessarily limited. Here we briefly describe the work we expect to complete under heads which, in some cases, group workpackages together.

This is the work of WP5. We now have an initial implementation of the Mbone - H.323 gateway and will be working to fully test this with its associated H.320 - H.323 gateway. We plan to extend the basic gateway functionality, which allows access to only one Mbone Terminal, to allow more than one Mbone terminal to enter an ITU-style multimedia conference at a time.

Having further developed the secure conference initiation mechanisms in SCUA, a tool which we delivered as part of D2, we expect to deliver a new version which can use smartcards and V3 certificates as part of the D3 software deliverable in month 21of the project (August, 1997). We will also complete an encrypting version of the Session Directory tool SDR with asymmetric encryption following the inclusion of symmetric encryption earlier.

During these final months, we plan to deliver two further sets of software. The first, D3, due in month 21 of the project, will include the latest version of SCUA and versions of the tools Rendezvous (audio and video) and RAT (audio) which can deliver higher quality encoding. In D4, due in month 24 (November, 1997), we will deliver a new user interface for the PC versions of the tools and the new secure version of the Session Directory (SDR) for all platforms.

Of the three major validation workpackages which have contributed to the work of the project over the past year, we will continue with only two. In addition we will draw together the feedback from the tool evaluation aspect of Workpackage 4 and the feedback in our use of the tools for our management meetings and deliver a summary report of our work on Usability.

We plan to run a further series of seminars in the autumn.

The second of the two planned workshops will take place in November, 1997.

Following on the completion of the first series of trials, Deutsche Telekom have decided not to progress to a second series at this time.

Most of the research work on this workpackage is now complete and we will spend the remaining months in drawing together all our user feedback and observations and producing a report.

The MERCI multimedia applications make heavy demands on the underlying network technology. To provide such services effectively, it is essential to measure QoS broadly, and provide suitable management facilities. We expect to take delivery of OpenView network management software donated by our sponsor, Hewlett-Packard in August and to have it setup and working routinely by the end of the project. With this software, and newer generic, application-independent multicast monitoring tools based on the IETF Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) such as MultiMON developed by our collaborator, CRC, we will be equipped for fault diagnosis, debugging and performance analysis of the Mbone infrastructure which is used for the multimedia conferencing service.

Our plans to upgrade a conference room and a lecture room at UCL during the past year have been subject to delay, but we expect them to be completed and ready for use by October 1997. We will then use them for the MERCI seminars and in the weekly project meetings.

As part of D3, we plan to demonstrate a working high performance conference room.

The "session directory" protocol still needs a number of enhancements and we shall continue to participate within the IETF in its update and Standardisation. We still need to work on the definition of mechanisms for the distribution of encryption keys needed for secure conferencing.

We plan to develop further the transcoding gateway and to deploy it at appropriate places in the network. The enhancement of CCCP (Conference Control Channel Protocol), still being pursued through the IETF, should also allow relevant conference control information to be made available to transcoders as required.

In August 1997, as part of the D3 deliverable, we will deliver the delayed multimedia server with the following features:

• Record multicast conference data whose source may be any of the conferees
• Playback recorded material either directly to one user or into another multicast conference
• Supply a large repository of archive space which is accessible to network users who wish to record or playback multimedia data
• Optimise multimedia storage with respect to storage cost and retrieval time
• Provide authentication and privacy for providers and users of the service

KTH will provide a report on the taxonomy of Multimedia servers at the time of the D3 deliverable (August, 1997).

We will continue to work closely with ICE-TEL, JAMES and MANICORAL. We plan also to continue our close association with SCIMITAR and, through the concertation events, to keep in touch with the other projects in the TELEMATICS for Research programme.

We plan also to take a major role in the TELEMATICS Conference and exhibitions in Barcelona in February, 1998.

This work-package is concerned with all aspects of relationships with other groups. This includes concertation activities like the SCIMITAR project and anything else set up by the Commission. It also includes the other groups with whom we have a particularly close relationship: MANICORAL and ICE-TEL. We try to ensure common interface specifications between the projects, co-ordinate deliveries of software between them, feed back an assessment of the quality of the deliverables, and ensure that the feedback is properly progressed inside the projects. Other activities include managing the interface between the project and other communities such as the relevant Standardisation bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the ITU Standardisation bodies, etc. We also relate to the various user groups in other programmes with similar needs.

This work-package is concerned with the development of the fundamental multimedia components: video, audio and shared workspace. Most developments represent improvements from the MICE components, but at least one new video tool will use a different coding scheme, and a shared whiteboard tool will arise from the MANICORAL project. Another aspect of the work-package is to ensure that the tools work on different hardware and software platforms.

It is important to ensure that the developers really understand the user requirements, that the user interfaces are really user-friendly and that there is a proper evaluation of the tools produced. The work-package will serve as semi-independent activity between the developers and the users. It is no coincidence that it is in this work-package that Shell Research Limited, one of our sponsoring partners, intends to participate at its own expense.

Of particular concern is the current split between the computer-based and the communications-based conferencing - and also that based on workstations versus that based on PCs. This work-package is concerned with addressing both these elements - and so is naturally led by an industrial partner. For some tools, this requires coding adaptation; for others, it requires inter-working units.

Only too often the tools are integrated, unnecessarily, into the network support foreseen by the supplier. In the MERCI project we envisage a variety of interconnected networks: LANs, Packet-Switched Networks, SMDS, ISDN and ATM. This work-package is concerned with ensuring that the tools work over these different networks, and to provide interworking units to ease their operation across the different technologies.

Multimedia conferencing embraces much more than human-human interaction; it is often very important to introduce pre-computed data into the conference, or to record information developed during the conference. This work-package is concerned with implementation, deployment and utilisation of multimedia servers.

The set-up, management and control of conferences is essential to allow widespread usage. This work-package is concerned with providing the components to allow distributed control: booking systems, the set-up of the conference and of intermediate relays, the control of active conferences and fault diagnosis.

It is currently fashionable to talk only of workstation conferencing. In some applications there is a natural agglomeration of people in a Conference Room. This work-package is concerned with aspects particularly appropriate to the Conference Room environment: Whiteboards, use of hardware codecs and full familiarity with echo-cancellers.

Many uses of conferencing require confidentiality and the assurance that only specific people are participating in the conferences. This requires authentication and encryption of the multimedia streams. The provision of encrypted streams is a function of WP3; the provision of the security technology itself is an activity of the ICE-TEL project. This work-package is concerned with the design of the architecture for secure conferencing, the key management architecture, the participant authentication, and the provision of encryption gateways where these are required.

Distance education is an excellent consumer of the MERCI technology. For this reason, we have organised this validation work-package to apply the tools in several distributed seminars. The components developed in the technology work-packages (WP3 - WP9) are tried out in this work-package, and the feedback used to improve the tools further.

Another important testbed for the technology is the annual series of surgical workshops held at the Middlesex hospital. The needs of surgical teaching and demonstration are more demanding than those of the WP11 seminars. This work-package will validate the highest quality Audio-Visual facilities demanded by the surgeons, together with the security (from WP10) needed in this domain and the instrumentation data, also vital to this area.

In this work-package, we are carrying through complete applications in close partnership with commercial bodies. Of course, it is first necessary to carry out detailed task analyses collaboratively, to ascertain which tools will be appropriate to the different potential applications - and which applications it makes sense to tackle with these tools.

The following tables illustrate the dependencies arising between the deliverables and the feedback needed from the various evaluating groups. The feedback deliverables are 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4.

In these tables the dependent objects are coded as:

D deliverable

I internal deliverable

Those deliverables to which the Work Package is a contributor are show in bold type.

Table 1.1 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP3 - MM Conference Components & cross-platform support

Table 1.2 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP4 - Usability and Assessment

Table 1.3 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP5 - Interworking

Table 1.4 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP6 - Network Support

Table 1.5 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP7 - Multimedia Server

Table 1.6 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP8 - Conference Management & control

Table 1.7 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP9 - Conference Room Support

Table 1.8 Inter-dependencies and Timing of Deliverables in WP10 - Security

Table 2 Interdependence and Timing between the Technical and Validation Work Packages

Notes

(f) ID of the form: 'WPn' where n = 01- ~10

Description of achievements and likely impact should be made under the following headings.

This project continues to have a strong impact on the users and to generate feedback from them. Many users having access to different networks as part of their research or commercial activity will find major advantages in the ability to use their normal networks for these advanced services. Organisations normally have a specific procurement policy be it PCs, UNIX workstations of various types or Macs; that the same platform can be used for multimedia conferencing has strong impact on the support requirements and investment decisions needed inside the organisation - and hence on the ease with which the technology can be introduced. At present there are still a number of distinct groups of users doing conferencing in disparate network environments - and there is no means for them to interwork; the multi-platform and multi-network environment which we are developing will enable them to do so.

Whilst there are many specific conferencing products available, most are much more limited in their approach to security, incorporation of servers and control functionality. Security is of great importance for many of the application areas which which we aim to address. This year we have developed and delivered a security architecture deliverable. Our present approach, which is compatible both with the security infrastructure being developed in Europe by ICE-TEL and with the approach of the research community in the US, supports much more flexible and comprehensive services; given the present US export laws, Europe must continue to develop comparable security of its own whilst maintaining an interworking capability.

Suppliers' interest in our work stems from its potential impact in many of their products. We have had considerable support from workstation manufacturers because of their interest in seeing the technology developed further. We have seen this interest from two major server suppliers. Hewlett-Packard, one of the sponsoring partners, has donated both hardware and software from their interest in its utilisation in these applications. Another server supplier has given its software free of charge with the same motivation. The network operators continue to show enthusiasm; BT is supporting many British national initiatives in this area (including at UCL), Eutelsat have supplied both network capacity and equipment to the project through their close relationship with INRIA. The research network operators are also supportive. UKERNA, a sponsoring partner, has made the Mbone a fully supported service on SuperJANET. In Finland, FUNET, the national academic and research network, funds the deployment of the technology through the Finnish National Support Centre. Finally, training organisations see the potential; hence the sponsorship of Hewlett-Packard for this project comes from their education and training centre, and we have language centres in involved in three countries with national projects.

There is no doubt that the technology is fast moving from prototype to product. It will not only embrace one product; several applications projects are proposing to take pieces of the technology developed here and emphasise specific areas. One intends to include microscopy-specific shared workspace software and develop an integrated product suited to that domain; another to develop a multimedia server incorporating parts of WP7 directly. Several are eyeing our network experience particularly closely; they intend to incorporate our control strategies into their products.

We have a proven track record of broad dissemination in this area. We are deliberately making the software widely available - and this is very popular with the suppliers. Clearly the commercial partners have a considerable advantage; they will get the software at a much earlier stage, and will have more influence on what is produced. It is not expected that all the software from the commercial suppliers will be disseminated as freely as from the research ones - hence the advantage also of having so many research partners in this activity.

We disseminate information widely at conferences and exhibitions. During the past year we have published 13 papers at conferences or in journals, made 3 standards contributions, and have submitted 2 further papers for publication or delivery. Details of these activities are given in A.9 (Dissemination activity and plans) above.

We continue to feel that, in view of the basic nature of the many technologies incorporated in this project, it would be inappropriate to formulate a central business plan. The partners in accordance with their natural commercial allies will pursue business planning. We still do not plan to form a single MERCI company as a result of this work; we do expect to spawn a number of products in companies, however, and may setup further companies, similar to New Learning, to exploit aspects of the work.

The project is already in an implementation phase since we have delivered software to specific users in other projects and to our sponsoring partners. As we continue to deliver improved versions of the tools as we have during the past year, especially the PC versions, we expect the scale of this implementation to widen. The availability of secure conferencing will also encourage the use of the tools, especially amongst commercial users. Although things have been improved to some extent during the year with the deployment of the new TEN34 links, we still see the major limitation to deployment at present being the lack of a stable wide-band network across Europe to complement the increasing capacities available at national level.

We foresee greater development of multimedia conferencing services as the applications on PC platforms become more robust and able to deliver the performance on Windows platforms that they can on UNIX. This is subject to network availability, of course. With the availability of the security infrastructure established by the ICE-TEL project and the simplified user interfaces which we are developing for all platforms, there will be an environment suitable for the development and use of conferencing services in far more places than is now possible.

We are among the leaders in our field world-wide. We have made important contributions to both the Internet standards (IETF) and those of the ITU (ITU-T) with 6 Internet drafts delivered during the past year. We are leading the development of systems to allow interaction between conferences based on ITU standards and those using the Internet Mbone standards.

We have made no reassessment since the start of the project.

As a project, we have made no reassessment since the last review though our commercial and sponsoring partnershave made an assessment and we will include this in our Technology Implementation Plan.

We remain committed through our commercial partner, TELES, to operating in the Multimedia Conferencing market for both hardware and software. With the setting up of New Learning by our partner UiO, we intend to operate strongly in the market for conference room and classroom systems as well as that for desktop conferencing systems addressed by TELES.

Our commercial partner, TELES, is the leader of the workpackage providing for inter-operation between the conferencing using the ITU standards and that using the Internet standards. They are well established suppliers of ITU standard conferencing products and will be optimally placed to exploit the commercial opportunities available for interworking software.

Likewise New Learning is specifically established to market the results of the project in the room-based conferencing field and is planning a major release of its new NT-based classroom system in the autumn.

At UiO an initiative has resulted in the establishment of a commercial company, New Learning, to market, supply and support conference rooms incorporating MERCI technology in December 1996.

We are maintaining our close contacts with the current users of our software and receiving valuable feed back from them. We are on target to achieve our plans for the further development necessary to assure that future exploitation will be even more successful than that achieved so far.

Demonstrations are planned in several areas during the next few months, to build up the case for larger-scale testbeds. We expect to see the technology move into products on a major scale - helped by the improvements being made inside the MERCI project.

Of particular importance is the emergence of cards supporting video capture and display integrated in with Standard APIs for Windows NT and Windows’95; these have made for greater use of our work of porting to those platforms. We are also starting to see Standard Cards and APIs for ISDN, and much more widespread deployment of that technology. This is opening up the full home and low-cost business markets. We are exploring applications in business and commerce as a result, and have put forward major demonstrator projects in the next Call.

One outcome of the activities of this project is the commercialisation planned of components of the Electronic Classroom. This commercialisation is planned for 1997/98, and will lead to substantial markets opening up for Distance Education. We plan a major trial in this area for the next Call which will involve the use of Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) technology. Of particular interest is the potential for deploying this technology in distance learning situations where the conventional communications infrastructure is poor. We are planning a major initiative with INCO partners in Cyprus and Eastern Europe to deploy applications of the technology for them.

The area of Interactive Cable TV is now flourishing. Some of the partners of the MERCI project will be transferring the MERCI technology to demonstrations using that technology over existing ACTS projects (AMUSE and IBCBN); however, we are also discussing with other industrial partners new initiatives in Home TV applications.

We feel the Server facilities we are providing are important. During the past year, we have completed a survey of current commercial and other multimedia conferencing servers and will release the MultiMedia Conference Recorder (MMCR) as part of the Software deliverable D3.

Over the next year we expect the routers on the Internet to continue to migrate towards high performance Mbone technology. As this movement progresses, it should also provide the capability of adding Resource Reservation. This will make possible significant deployment of the MERCI technology for high performance conferencing. We believe that this will make very serious inroads into the professional conferencing market. The availability of high performance ITU-Mbone gateways developed by MERCI, will be extremely important because of the likely lag time before the value of the Mbone mechanisms is fully accepted.

MERCI has delivered a toolkit for building tailored applications for real-time interactive multimedia collaboration systems for specific user groups.

Various manufacturers plan to produce commercial products based on the toolkit. The details can be made available privately to the commission.

MERCI will continue to deliver improved versions of this toolkit. The tools, all of which will conform to industry standards, allow the following types of interaction:

These tools, from UCL and from INRIA, provide options for high quality audio, good resistance to poor network conditions and encryption.

The video tool will provide new high quality video with in-built scaling for differing network conditions to allow users to receive the best quality which their connectivity will allow. It already allows encryption to provide security.

This tool, NTE, has been ported successfully to PC platforms.

The new MERCI whiteboard tool, being written in JAVA, will be available for platforms which provide JAVA support including, we hope, the MAC. An initial prototype of this tool was demonstrated at the last Annual Review of the project. Alpha versions are being distributed inside the project and we expect to release an early version at the end of the project. It provides basic functionality expected in a whiteboard including drawing, text input and the ability to import standard image files.

The current session announcement tool, SDR, has been further enhanced to provide the means to advertise and to invite attendance at secure conferences. Work is proceeding to allow authentication of those attending.

The Gateway will consist of several components, available as separate entities or as a single integrated tool. The components, comprising the Session Controller, the H.323/MBONE Gateway and the H.323/H.320 Gateway, will provide simple relaying between the two conferencing environments. This functionality can be further enhanced to provide transcoding and other sophisticated features in the future.

We plan to release this new tool as part of the Software deliverable D3. It allows a client at the end of a low bandwidth link, such as ISDN-2, to link to an Mbone conference through a server running on the MBone. The gateway server can multiplex and/or transcode audio and reduce video bandwidth by lowering the rate or sending only selected streams.

This tool will be provided by MANICORAL, a related project in the TELEMATICS programme.

November 1997

MERCI & MANICORAL

(E.g. brochure, software, demonstrator, specification, prototype, etc.)

Software toolkit

The European research community.

European education institutions at all levels.

We anticipate increased co-operation within the European research community as research collaborations are established which can communicate freely using these tools in addition to their meetings face to face and their use of indirect tools such as mail and email.

This part of the document should cover, at least, the following elements. Please use the formats provided (see bi-monthly management report where appropriate).

In addition to the provision of manpower, Hewlett-Packard have provided substantial amounts of equipment equipment and software to the four academic partners. These have included PCs, a Server, peripherals, video server software and network management software, which has better equipped us to develop the use of PCs on the project, and to improve the network management activities of WP6.

This list should contain all deliverables due on or before the end of the reporting period.

* Expected formal submission with Peer Reviews of all the constituent tools.

It was originally delivered on the web site in Feb 97 and replaced by an updated version in June 97.

Having provided the necessary background, two chapters provide the meat of this Deliverable. First we specify the security procedures to be used for MBONE conferencing. These include both securing the basic tools, and providing mechanisms for key distribution. Here our main proposal is to use modified versions of the Session Announcement and Session Description protocols; these are reliant on Public Key systems, and methods for key distribution by Directory, WWW and electronic mail procedures. Finally, we go through a similar exercise for the securing of coupled ITU-T and MBONE conferences; here the ITU-T mechanisms are not fully defined, and different facilities for securing the coupled systems are needed.

Based on the results of the earlier MICE project, MERCI - Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration - aims to integrate technology components to allow for proper development of tools for multimedia collaboration.

The components developed within MERCI technology workpackages are tested within validation workpackages and the feedback is used to improve theses tools further. Once they are considered rugged enough they are made available to other projects and institutions.

As distance education is an excellent consumer of the MERCI technology, the "Seminar Workpackage" (WP11) has been organised to apply the tools in several distributed seminars.

This deliverable describes the work that has been done within the Seminar Workpackage in the reporting period. It covers the regular networked multimedia project meetings and the first set of MERCI seminars. A short introduction into booking systems for Mbone events is also given.

This is a Project deliverable. The tools we are delivering are freely available on World-Wide Web and ftp sites around the world. We have documented each of them under the headings Release Description, Systems Requirements List, Installation Guidelines, and the Web source for the software. Although we provided versions of the released tools in February, we have updated this deliverable following JENC8 at which we demonstrated further improvements.

FreePhone, Rendez-Vous and RAT, delivered in D1, are now given added functionality and are available on more platforms. FreePhone now provides high-frequency sampling and supports stereo and the L16 codec. Rendez-Vous is now compatible with VIC and available for PCs running FreeBSD and Windows 95/NT. RAT provides mixing functionality to allow use in a gateway and16 bit encoding on all codecs.