The need for a software infrastructure to support community networking applications

Although it is widely understood that there remain many important and interesting technical, regulatory and business issues to be resolved, the transport infrastructure for community networking is quickly becoming a reality. However, a crucial area that has received less attention up to the present time is the architecture of a software infrastructure that enables the broad range of multimedia communications applications which must be part of a comprehensive and successful community network. Such an infrastructure, sometimes called a “middleware” layer, provides a set of critical core services to the application programmer. Beyond basic transport of media streams, such services include user authentication, usage accounting, discovery and allocation of special resources, directory services (for, e.g., users, service providers and available events), and flexible multiparty multimedia session control