The customer is a multinational company and one of the global leaders in business communication solutions development, offering a wide range of products. It’s recognized as a leading innovator in all areas of intelligent connections.
Challenge
One of the customer’s products is a communication media server that allows users to create voice and video meetings with advanced capabilities, including screen sharing. Orion was asked to develop a gateway between the media server and the Skype for Business (SfB) server so that users registered on one of the servers could reach those registered on the other one for audio/video calls, text messages, etc.
As a result, users registered on one of the servers could reach users on another server via audio/video calls, text messages, or do screen sharing. In the end, a company that has both solutions mentioned above or willing to add the second solution to the existing one should be able to connect both servers and have a combined network supporting both types of clients.
Solution
The development team analyzed Microsoft SfB screen sharing protocol based on the RDP protocol used by Microsoft’s terminal server, but with some limitations related to telecommunications. Also, the SIP protocol version used by SfB has many changes and additions from Microsoft. ICE/STUN protocols are used by Microsoft during connection establishment to support NAT and firewall.
In developed gateway, open-source RDP stack and ICE/STUN protocol library were chosen to implement the communication layer between Skype for Business and Media server. They were heavily updated to work correctly with discovered differences in the Microsoft product.
The Orion team has developed a completely new component to convert screen sharing information from SfB clients (RDP protocol) to Media server clients (proprietary protocol based on REST) and vice versa. During component development, Orion has also created a complete test lab, allowing the customer to perform versatile testing with different clients.
Results
The solution delivered by our team has become an essential part of the customer’s product, strengthening its leadership in the area of business communications.
Major Functions:
- Connection negotiation with ICE/STUN protocols
- Audio/video calls from and to Skype for Business clients
- Screen sharing information exchange between servers
Technologies:
Backend:
- C/C++
Telephony:
- SIP
Connectivity:
- RDP
- FreeRdp
- ICE/STUN
- REST
Software:
- Libre
