Voting Based Bandwidth Management in Multiparty Video Conferences

摘要

Video conferences are considered as an attractive application in high-performance networks. Nevertheless video conference services are not that broadly used like services such as e-mail or WWW. There are several reasons for this. Most existing conference system solutions do not sufficiently support closed group conferences in a global scales. They also do not provide an appropriate bandwidth management to smoothly play out the audio and video streams at the receivers. This is, however, important for closed multiparty conferences due to the tight relationship among the participants which usually results in the presentation of all partners on each screen independently of their current role (speaker or listener). In this paper we present an approach for managing the bandwidth in global video conferences using a hierarchical system topology and a voting scheme. The approach is based on the use of point-to-point links and a selective transmission of the participants. Measurements substantiate its applicability.