Conclusions

The separation of the distributed operation of the exchange of ``speech'' in the conference from the floor control mechanism has led to the possibility of implementing an ``open floor'' conferencing system, and then adding floor control. The only operations necessary to add floor control are those required to allow or prevent use of a channel from each user to any other. The extra state incurred in the conference server processes is the 2D matrix of user by user channels, with each entry showing allowed/disallowed. In the future, we hope to implement the floor control mechanisms described and integrate them with the open floor conferencing system we have. We will then be able to experiment with floor control.

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Figure: An Example of <#1324#> xconf<#1324#> in Action