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Department for Electrical and Communications Engineering | Networking Laboratory |
The course Networked Multimedia Protocols and Services addresses transport and control protocols for IP-based environments. We will start with the Internet Multimedia Communication Architecture and then address the individual components in quite some depth. This will include RTP and RTCP, SAP and SDP as well as the more recent Internet Media Guides, and media streaming protocols. A strong focus will be on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) including its architecture, signaling details, security, NAT & firewall traversal, service creation, presence, and telephony/conferencing.
The course will combine lectures with practical coding assignments. The latter are meant to improve familiarity with protocol operation and implementation in a few selected areas. Coding assignments are to be done in small groups of two or three students. Practical assignments can be done as a follow-up on this course.
For questions concerning the course, please use the Newsgroup opinnot.sahko.s-38.tietoverkkotekniikka or send mail to
Lectures will be held: Tuesday 8 - 10
(S1) and Thursday 10 - 12 (S4).
Exercises will be held: Wednesday
14 - 16 (S1).
Three of the exercise dates will be used for lectures to make up for some an interruption due to the IETF meetings.
The next exam will be on 15.12.2006, 13-16, S5. Don't forget to REGISTER
The lectures, exercises, and the exam will in English language.
To pass the course, the two coding assignments must be completed and the written exam must be passed.
The final review date for the assignments will be announced later. Please complete your assignments and email them beforehand.
The final grade will be based both on the written exam (70%) and the assignments (30%).
Note that the slides of weeks 47, 48, 49, 50 and assignmet 2 are only accessible from workstations within the university network.
Note that the assignments 1 and 2 have only
indicative deadlines; these are the handout dates of the next
respective assignment.
Please return the assignments by sending an email with a tar or zip
file containing the binary and source code.
The lecture material (slides) will be available in digital format (PDF) from this web page.
While there are many books on
SIP and related standards, only few of them turn out to be really
useful (rather than, e.g. outdated).
For IP-based multimedia communications in general, there are not even
many books (worth mentioning). A notable exception is: Colin Perkins,
"RTP: Audio and Video for the Internet", Addison-Wesley, June 2003,
ISBN 0-672-32249-8 (which, however, only covers a fraction of the
course).
Therefore, rather than relying on books, we recommend to stick with primary material — in this case: RFCs and Internet Drafts — to which we will point for the individual lectures as far as possible. For parts of the coding assignments, it is essential read through pieces of the original documentation to properly interpret packet formats or protocol processing rules.
The following RFCs are likely to be useful (not just) for assignments 2 and 3. The Internet Drafts on RTSP and SDP just provide a view on the latest developments but today's client and server implementations will most likely stick to the respective RFCs.