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Collaboration Environments for the Defense Information Infrastructure

Collaboration services may be employed in a variety of application contexts including collaborative situation assessment, mission rehearsal and training, planning, course of action selection and execution management, and after action review. Collaboration services enable individuals and groups to communicate and work together in asynchronous and synchronous settings, ranging from formal meetings (e.g., pre-specified time, (virtual) place, agenda, and task) to informal interactions. This is necessary to enable distributed briefings, collaborative planning, analysis, and mission rehearsal.

The Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) Common Operating Environment (COE) is an architecture for integrating and building software to ensure interoperability among joint service applications. The architecture is composed of software infrastructure, standards, Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs), and guidelines. The DII COE is comprised of the kernel (operating systems and related desktop services), infrastructure services (database management, network management, communications and presentation services), and common support applications (office automation, message processing, mapping). On top of the DII COE reside the mission applications. The DII COE Technical Working Groups (TWGs) are advisory groups made up of technical representatives from each service/agency and provide recommendations on issues relating to DII architecture and implementation in the functional or technical area addressed by the working group. The Multimedia and Collaboration Working Group (MCTWG) focuses on multimedia and collaboration common support applications for the DII COE.

Supporting our Department of Defense (DOD) sponsors, the cross service DII COE MCTWG, led by MITRE, has authored DOD wide requirements, performed COTS analysis, and is in the process of working with several DOD organizations to pilot standards based collaboration tools in order to select commercial products to integrate into the Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) Common Operating Environment (COE). Because the DII COE currently supports asynchronous multi-user collaboration via electronic mail, text chat, news groups, and World Wide Web pages, the MCTWG has identified synchronous multipoint collaboration requirements to include shared whiteboards (including maps and images), audio and videoconferencing, and shared applications. Shared applications include the distributed viewing, control and manipulation of office automation tools, browsers and geographic information systems. The focus of the working group is to evaluate and recommend individual collaboration capabilities that will make up the components of a future collaboration environment for the DII COE.

In its collaboration tools assessment, the working group examined tools with respect to cross platform support (Solaris, HP Unix, Windows NT), functionality (specified by the agency/service representatives), and compliance with formal and de facto standards (specified by agency/service representatives). The piloting phase will help to assess application interoperability, integration with legacy infrastructure, performance, network, and security issues.

Because DII users need to operate across platforms, operating systems, and applications, common standards are critical to ensuring interoperability among platforms and mission applications (policy makers, warfighters, analysts, and coalition partners). The international standards for conferencing over IP-based networks is an area which is evolving and generating much attention and support from commercial industry. Standards recommended by the working group are those specified by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for IP-based audio and videoconferencing and for dataconferencing. The ITU umbrella standard for audio and videoconferencing on IP-based networks, the H.323 standard, specifies the audio and video codecs (coders and decoders of the audio and video streams) call control and management, and bandwidth management. This standard is being adopted by industry at a rapid pace, and interoperability among different vendor tools is beginning to appear. The ITU standard for dataconferencing (to enable standards-based shared whiteboard applications), the T.120 standard, specifies the communication services, network transport, conference controls, binary file transfer, application template, and whiteboard multipoint annotation protocols. Parts of this standard are being adopted by industry, and does not yet have the same following as the H.323 standard, although many vendors have announced future support for the standard. Currently, interoperability in the shared whiteboard area is lacking outside of some beta products.

Figure 1 illustrates important emerging standards for collaboration in the areas of data conferencing, videoconferencing, audio and video coders and decoders, communications control, multipoint communication, and bandwidth allocation.

Area	Standard	Description
Video Conferencing	H.320 H.321 H.322 H.323 H.324	ISDN ATM Guaranteed quality of service LANs Non-guaranteed quality of service LANs POTS with V.34 modem
Video Codecs	H.261 H.263	P*64 Kbps Codec for low bit rate (< 64 Kbps) video over POTS
Audio Codecs	G.711 G.722 G.723.1 G.728 G.729	3.1 KHz at 48, 56, and 64 Kbps 7 KHz at 48, 56, and 64 Kpbs 3.1 HHz at 5.3 and 6.4 Kbps 3.1 KHz at 16 Kbps 3.1 KHz at 8 Kbps
Communications Control	H.225.0 H.245 Q.931 RAS	Messages for multiplexing and signaling (registration, packetization, synchronization of media streams) using RTP and RTCP Messages for opening and closing channels for media streams and other control requests Call signaling and setup protocol Registration administration and status signaling function
Data Conferencing	T.121 T.122, T.125 T.123 T.124 T.126 T.127 T.128	Generic application template Multipoint communications service protocols Network specific transport protocols Generic conference controls for establishing and managing multipoint conferences Whiteboard multipoint still image annotation protocol Binary file transfer protocol Application sharing protocol
Multipoint Communications	IP Multicast	Internet standard for establishing and managing multipoint conferencing channels (IETF)
Bandwidth	RSVP RTP RTCP	Resource Reservation Protocol to reserve bandwidth and quality of service control (IETF) Real-time Transport Protocol enables sequencing, time stamps data, etc. (IETF) Real Time Control Protocol relays control information (IETF)

Figure 1. Emerging Collaboration Standards

While the DII COE is focused on cross-platform, cross-application interoperability, key concerns remain concerning the adoption of "enough" of the standards by vendors. Currently, adoption of standards in vendor offerings is in the early stages and there remain interoperability problems among different platforms, applications, and networks. Interoperability in collaborative settings includes not only being able to exchange various forms of media (e.g., text, audio, video) but also interoperability among room-based H.320 ISDN video conferencing systems and H.323 IP-based desktop conferencing systems.

Important to the audio, video, and dataconferencing capability is how users can initiate and manage conferencing sessions. Many requirements have been identified ranging from the need to:

1. initiate, terminate, discover and join sessions
2. establish and transfer session roles (e.g. chair, participant)
3. add, delete and exclude participants
4. Ensure the security of sessions to enable both public sessions (open to any participants) and private sessions (open only to invited participants)
5. Provide for persistence of sessional information to support on-going collaborations (e.g., the state of the data, applications, participants, task/environment)

Although users can initiate and manage sessions, using bundled software, with their conferencing clients, these capabilities are often lightweight. The use of a conference server provides a fuller suite of management capabilities in addition to the multipoint capability. Conference servers are extremely new to the market place, and standards and vendor support for conference management for suite of conferencing services are still evolving. Additional issues that need to be addressed both operationally and technically include multi-user shared applications, collaboration across security boundaries, and constraints on and variability of bandwidth (especially limited field capabilities).

The MCTWG has reviewed commercial products for audio and videoconferencing and shared whiteboards against the service/agency derived criteria and standards. The results of the review (including an overall market assessment for real-time conferencing tools, DII COE evaluation criteria for shared whiteboards and audio and videoconferencing, and product evaluations against the criteria) are documented in a briefing, which is available to interested parties. The working group is in the process of launching pilots to evaluate how commercial tools operate in varying environments. The group continues to monitor the rapidly evolving commercial tool offerings.