Deployment issues of a VoIP conferencing system in a Virtual Conferencing Environment

Abstract

Real-time services have been supported by and large on circuitswitched networks. Recent trends favour services ported on packet-switched networks. For audio conferencing, we need to consider many issues -scalability, quality of the conference application, floor control and load on the clients/servers -to name a few. In this paper, we describe an audio service framework designed to provide a Virtual Conferencing Environment (VCE). The system is designed to accommodate a large number of end users speaking at the same time and spread across the Internet. The framework is based on Conference Servers [14], which facilitate the audio handling, while we exploit the SIP capabilities for signaling purposes. Client selection is based on a recent quantifier called "Loudness Number" that helps mimic a physical face-to-face conference. We deal with deployment issues of the proposed solution both in terms of scalability and interactivity, while explaining the techniques we use to reduce the traffic. We have implemented a Conference Server (CS) application on a campus-wide network at our Institute.

Applications of converged networks in construction

“…The industry has adopted the session initiation protocol (SIP) because of its scalability, compatibility and ease of use (Prasad et al, 2003). The use of standards provides the platform for interoperability between equipment and software from different vendors.…”

Fixing Number of Floors for Virtual Voice-Only Conference - an Empirical Study

“…It can be noted here that the number of streams exchanged here would always be constant and user interface designs are going to be simpler in this case compared to [16]. We can also harness the property of LN and fewer change in speakers -when the participants are managing themselves -to reduce the number of streams exchanged across CSs [15].…”

Server Allocation Algorithms for VoIP Conference

“…We devote this section to the description of the system architecture [19,20] in which the allocation problem is set. For details of the architecture for VoIP conference we refer to our work in [18] and furthered in [19,20].…”

“…For details of the architecture for VoIP conference we refer to our work in [18] and furthered in [19,20]. We do not restrict our conferencing system to work on small conferences only, but rather on large audio Virtual Conference Environments (VCE) that have hundreds (or even touching thousands) of users across a Wide Area Network (WAN) such as the Internet.…”

“…In every packet interval (not more than 40ms to support interactivity) each CS selects four streams out of the several received from other CSs and its own clients. These will be sent to clients in its domain, often on multicast [9,17,20]. Usually, a SIPS and a CS run on the same computer.…”