Teleconferencing for the EFDA laboratories

Since early 2000 the Joint European Torus (JET) has been operating as a shared facility; several other European fusion experiments will follow. This requires tools for Remote Participation and in particular for Teleconferencing in the widest sense. Similar requirements exist for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and JET design and construction activities as well as for administrative and management areas. The 23 Associates of the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) are now making significant use of such techniques. Many technical and scientific meetings are regularly organised as distributed meetings with audiences and speakers spread over several locations. While presentation (electronic slides) sharing has converged on a single approach based on the open-source vnc software, two different technologies have been adopted for Internet-based audio and video conferencing. Many labs in the JET collaboration are using the Virtual room videoconferencing system (VRVS) infrastructure, originally developed by the California Institute of Technology for the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) community, with the open-source MBone tools VIC and RAT for video and audio. Several other labs have opted for the H.323 umbrella standards. The two systems are not fully interoperable. Hence, an EFDA working group has been created to explore and compare the two approaches, and to produce recommendations for the future. The paper presents the functional requirements for teleconferencing, taking into account the different application scenarios that are expected in the European Fusion community. It then describes technical solutions and the proposed approach, which reflect the uncertainties about the future standards development.