Enhancing social communication between groups

This paper describes a prototype software platform that supports advanced communications services, specifically services enabling effective group-to-group communications with a social purpose, between remote homes. The architecture, the individual components, their interfaces, and the rationale for building the software platform, such as the usage of standard consumer equipment, are described. A specific novel network based capability, called orchestration, is described as are the results of initial user and technical trials and some plans for future work.