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AMS experts progress work on requirements, architecture, and information flows

November 5, 2009

The ITU just completed its most recent meeting of Study Group 16, which is the group working on, among other things, the new Advanced Multimedia System (AMS). The new standard, which is scheduled for completion in 2011 will be numbered H.325 once complete.

The particular Question, as the working groups are called in the ITU, working on AMS is Question 12. During this most recent meeting, Question 12 made progress on several key work items including requirements, architecture, and information flows for AMS. During the meeting, the Question received an initial contribution that will serve as the base text for the signaling syntax that will be used within AMS. Accessibility matters were discussed and the experts considered various network-based services that might aid in making services easier to access for everybody, including speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech elements.

While work on AMS has largely been done via face-to-face meetings, the group plans to hold electronic meetings on a regular basis, beginning December 2009. Information about the meetings will be posted on the H.325 Design mailing list, which is open to everyone.

Over the next year, the group hopes to solidify the architecture and signaling. It is expected that this new system will be a significant departure in terms of messaging syntax and architecture, as opposed to previous multimedia systems. The group plans to use XML to define the AMS protocol, which should prove to make it significantly easier for application developers to build AMS-compliant applications.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between AMS and previous systems is that it will be a distributed system that fully exploits the power provided by IP networks. Applications developers will be able to create any kind of application, including voice, video, application sharing, whiteboarding, file transfer, and so forth, without being dependent on a terminal or system manufacturer to introduce that functionality. The reason is that, as a core aspect of the design, all applications are autonomous and communicate with other applications through an entity referred to as the "container". Essentially, AMS will be an open application platform that enables multiple modes of communication using any number of devices and applications.