A group communication tool for the new IPv6 networking

With a view to next generation telecommunication networks, an IST project resulted in the migration of widely used applications from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to IPv6. Among these a tele-conference and tele-meeting application called ISABEL has not only been successfully adapted, but also further studied to include more advanced services.

Digital Economy

ISABEL is a telecommunication tool for group collaboration that offers unique work organisation over private virtual networks or the Internet. This tool has the potential to achieve organisation of meetings or training sessions in the most time-efficient way. Therefore, travel time along with project and activity lead times may be considerably reduced and thus the overall productivity may be significantly increased in organisations, groups or projects. On the grounds of modern videoconferencing for multi-points over the Internet, ISABEL creates the suitable collaborative environment that may be easily customised to user needs. In this way, the provided service heavily rely on the specified requirements of a given set of users, offering specialised support for various purposes. These may include tele-meetings, tele-classes and teleconferences, as well as other services that are tailored to specific needs of a customer meeting. In comparison to conventional videoconferencing, this software technology may render a PC into an advanced conferencing terminal or Multipoint Control Unit (MCU). Such a terminal may easily connect to other terminals for a session and thus achieve effective collaboration with many endpoints in various types of meetings. These might be corporate and project meetings, training and distance learning, workshops as well as congresses. Using Transport Control Protocol (TCP) - User Diagram Protocol (UDP)/IP, ISABEL supports various mixtures of networking technologies, including LANs, ATM, ISDN, Frame Relay and satellite. After a ten-year development, ISABEL has been successfully used with IPv4. The so-called LONG (Laboratories over Next Generation Networks) project has adapted the application to be migrated to IPv6. In addition, it was shown that ISABEL real time application may exploit the advanced IPv6 properties in order to provide new services, such as distribution of public events to other sites external to the collaborating organisations, groups or projects.