Helsinki University of Technology Department for Electrical and Communications Engineering Networking Laboratory

S-38.3152 Networked Multimedia Protocols and Services

Overview

Starting with a review of the basics of IP-based multimedia communications, we will explore the details of media announcements (SAP, SDP), Internet Media Guides (IMG), media streaming (RTSP), and as the focus of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as defined in RFC 3261 and may related documents. We will discuss concepts, protocol details, the concepts for SIP extensions, present SIP building blocks, and the various approaches to SIP-based service creation. Specific application scenarios to be discussed include telephony as well as instant messaging and personal presence. We will also address security and NAT/firewalls traversal. Finally, system design aspects (for endpoints as well as for infrastructures) will be investigated.

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.

Announcements

Support

For questions concerning the course, please use the Newsgroup opinnot.sahko.s-38.tietoverkkotekniikka or send mail to

Lectures and exercises

The regular lectures and exercises will be held in the second period: Tuesday, 8-10 (S1), Wednesday, 14-16 (S1), and Thursday 10-12 (S4).

The next exam dates are 20.12.2007 Thursday 13-16 (S5) and 10.03.2008 Monday 9-12 (S5). Don't forget to REGISTER

The lectures, exercises, and the exam will in English language.

Requirements and grading

To pass the course, the two coding assignments must be completed and the written exam must be passed.

The final grade will consider both on the written exam (about 70%) and the assignments (about 30%). To pass the course, 50% of the points in the assignments and 50% of the points in the exam must be achieved!

The final review date for the assignments will be announced later. Please complete your assignments and email them beforehand.

Time Table

Week Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
38 (17.9.-21.9.) Short introduction Network programming: C and
Network programming: Java
Assignment 1 (pre-release)
44 (29.10.-2.11.) Introduction and Overview
Packet MM basics
45 (5.11.-9.11.) Network programming (recap)
Assignment 1 (repeat)
RTP/RTCP
RTP Extensions
Payload formats
Session descriptions (SDP)
Session announcements (SAP)
46 (12.11.-16.11.) Media and Program Guides
Internet media streaming architectures
RTSP
HTTP streaming, streaming control
Broadcast/multicast streaming

Assignment 2
Introduction to SIP
SIP Architecture and components
47 (19.11.-23.11.) Basic session setup and teardown
Registration and service location
Peer-to-peer background
Peer-to-peer streaming
Peer-to-peer SIP
Security for IP-based Multimedia I:
Signaling security
48 (26.10.-30.11.) Security for IP-based Multimedia II:
Media security

Dan Wing's Media Security overview
NAT and Firewall Traversal SIP service creation:
Architectures and interfaces

SIP for presence and instant messaging
49 (3.12.-7.12.) No lecture.
See reading tasks below.
Assignment 3 Independence day
50 (10.12.-14.12.) SIP for telephony
Multimedia conferencing with SIP
SIP deployment aspects
Exam hints
No lecture.
51 (17.12.-21.12.) Exam

Assignments

The assignments will have deadlines assigned which are indicative or hard (as will be indicated).

Please return the assignments prior to the deadline by sending an email with a tar or zip file containing the binary and source code. All the assigment submission must be send to Jegadish Devadoss <jegadish (at) netlab.tkk.fi> and Mikko Kiiski <makiiski (at) netlab.tkk.fi>

Assignment 1

Assignment-1 Description

Assignment 2

Assignment-2 Description

Assignment 3

Assignment-3 Description

Resources

Assignment resources

1. A RTSP server is running at the address 130.233.154.184:8554

2. The URL that would fetch the song is rtsp://130.233.154.184:8554/song1.wav UPDATE: URL changed to rtsp://130.233.154.184:8554/song.wav

Note: If you are behind a firewall, then you would still get all the RTSP signaling messages. But the media packets may not reach you, if there is firewall problem

UDP packets from nmps.netlab.hut.fi(130.233.154.184) now reaches machines in Maari-A(IP Address Range: 130.233.248.111 to 141). Use these machines to avoid problesm related to firewall.

IMPORTANT: song1.wav has been removed from the server due to media compatability issues. A new file song.wav (not song1.wav) has been added. So use rtsp://130.233.154.184:8554/song.wav for the assignment task.

Reading tasks

Course Material

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). The book by Gonzalo Camarillo provides a very good overview (but also discusses the 3GPP Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) which we do not address in this course).

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.

The Internet Draft Tracker is useful to find any Internet Draft by name (and associated information).

Finally, some useful links to the various (IETF) working groups

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