ACCESS CONTROL TO COMMUNICATION FACILITY
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Accused Products
Abstract
Access to a teleconferencing system is granted to a prospective attendee (1) for a predetermined duration, by dating the user for access to the facilities (107) for a predetermined duration, and allocating resources (110) to the user for the predetermined duration. This duration can be defined in terms of an expiry date, or a predetermined number of separate occasions for which access to the facilities is permitted, or a combination of both. To allow a user to break out of a conference and rejoin it, multiple accessions within a predetermined period (such as one day) may be counted as a single accession in counting towards the predetermined number of accessions. Different users may be validated for use of the same resources for different durations. This arrangement provides many of the existing capabilities of both booked and reservationless conferences in a single unified system. A reservationless conference facility can be emulated by specifying a very large permitted number of calls, or an expiry date in the distant future. To emulate a booked call, an individual attendee can be limited to just one accession, or to a very limited time range. Unlike a conventional booked call, the actual conference time can be rescheduled, provided it remains within the selected constraints. To encourage responsible use of the reservation facilities, allocation of resources may be prioritised for users having the most restricted duration of access. In particular, the guarantee of availability for a pre-booked call can be emulated by the prioritisation of calls for which the permitted users have the most restricted validity terms. This provides a form of demand-management, as the network can identify the number of passcodes valid at any one time and schedule resources accordingly.
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Citations
26 Claims
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1-13. -13. (canceled)
- 14. A method of allocating telecommunications facilities for the execution of a conferencing function, comprising the steps of validating a user to permit access to the facilities for a predetermined duration selectable by the user, characterized in that the method allocates resources to the user for the predetermined duration so as to allow the user to make multiple accessions to the conference facilities at any time before the expiry of the predetermined duration, and connects said resources to the user in response to such accessions
- 21. A telecommunications conferencing facility comprising a provisioning facility for allocating resources to a user and a validation processor for creating validation information, characterised in that the provisioning facility and the validation processor control access to conferencing resources such that a user is permitted multiple accessions to the conference facilities at any time before the expiry of a predetermined duration selectable by the user.
Specification