Notes on the use of RTP for shared workspace applications

The Real-time Transport Protocol, RTP, has become the dominant protocol for streaming audio and video in IP-based environments. A number of proposals have been made which attempt to build on this success and apply RTP for shared workspace applications. We discuss the needs of such applications and the features provided by RTP, with an aim to showing why RTP is not appropriate for such uses

9-1-1 Calls for Voice-over-IP

This document enumerates some of the major opportunities and challenges for providing emergency call (9-1-1) services using IP technology. In particular, all VoIP devices are effectively mobile. The same IP telephony device works anywhere in the Internet, keeping the same external identifier such as an E.164 number or URL. (Note: This was also submitted as an ex-parte filing to the Federal Communications Commission.

DotSlash: Providing Dynamic Scalability to Web Applications with On-demand Distributed Query Result Caching

Scalability poses a significant challenge for today's web applications, mainly due to the large population of potential users. To effectively address the problem of short-term dramatic load spikes caused by web hotspots, we developed a self-configuring and scalable rescue system called DotSlash. The primary goal of our system is to provide dynamic scalability to web applications by enabling a web site to obtain resources dynamically, and use them autonomically without any administrative intervention. To address the database server bottleneck, DotSlash allows a web site to set up on-demand distributed query result caching, which greatly reduces the database workload for read mostly databases, and thus increases the request rate supported at a DotSlash-enabled web site. The novelty of our work is that our query result caching is on demand, and operated based on load conditions. The caching remains inactive as long as the load is normal, but is activated once the load is heavy. This approach offers good data consistency during normal load situations, and good scalability with relaxed data consistency for heavy load periods. We have built a prototype system for the widely used LAMP configuration, and evaluated our system using the RUBBoS bulletin board benchmark. Experiments show that a DotSlash-enhanced web site can improve the maximum request rate supported by a factor of 5 using 8 rescue servers for the RUBBoS submission mix, and by a factor of 10 using 15 rescue servers for the RUBBoS read-only mix

Have I Met You Before? Using Cross-Media Relations to Reduce SPIT

Most legitimate calls are from persons or organizations with strong social ties such as friends. Some legitimate calls, however, are from those with weak social ties such as a restaurant the callee booked a table on-line. Since a callee's contact list usually contains only the addresses of persons or organizations with strong social ties, filtering out unsolicited calls using the contact list is prone to false positives. To reduce these false positives, we first analyzed call logs and identified that legitimate calls are initiated from persons or organizations with weak social ties through transactions over the web or email exchanges. This paper proposes two approaches to label incoming calls by using cross-media relations to previous contact mechanisms which initiate the calls. One approach is that potential callers offer the callee their contact addresses which might be used in future correspondence. Another is that a callee provides potential callers with weakly-secret information that the callers should use in future correspondence in order to identify them as someone the callee has contacted before through other means. Depending on previous contact mechanisms, the callers use either customized contact addresses or message identifiers. The latter approach enables a callee to label incoming calls even without caller identifiers. Reducing false positives during filtering using our proposed approaches will contribute to the reduction in SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony)