Measurements to validate optimised bandwidth usage by the distributed network entities architecture for multimedia conferencing

Abstract

Real-time Multimedia conferencing is becoming an important part of today’s communications architecture. Such applications are gaining popularity for use within both the Internet and Corporate Intranets. Some of the reasons include the following: 1. Multimedia applications can be easily seen, heard and understood. 2. Multimedia communications are set to become the future generation of communications. 3. Multimedia conferencing will allow meetings to be held in a virtual manner. This means office and critical staff can have meetings with others without even leaving their office. 4. Video streaming will allow instantaneous access to video files scattered around the globe. In order to allow the current and future system and network structures to support such high bandwidth and resource hungry applications, a form of distributed processing is necessary. This focus of this paper is to discuss the design of such a distributed system and to validate the bandwidth claims by using certain mechanisms to obtain measurement results. This paper will take us initially through the theory, design stages and implementation of this distributed architecture. It will then discuss methods of testing and validating the testing measurement results obtained. The above research is being funded in parts by IRPA (Ministry of Science, Malaysia), Multimedia Research Labs and Network Research Group (NRG) University of Science Malaysia.