Proposal and evaluation of a network construction method for a scalable P2P video conferencing system

Abstract

Recently, video conferencing systems based on peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology have been widely deployed. However, most of them can only support up to a dozen of participants. In this paper, we propose a novel method to construct and manage a P2P network for a scalable video conferencing system. Our method consists of three parts: a network construction mechanism, a tree reorganization mechanism, and a failure recovery mechanism. First, the network is constructed as new peers join a conference. Then, the tree topology is reorganized taking into account the heterogeneity of the available bandwidth among peers and their degree of participation so that, those participants, i.e., peers that can have many children peers and/or often speak are located near the root of the tree. As a result, the delay from speakers to the other participants is reduced. Through simulation experiments, we verify that our tree reorganization mechanism can offer smooth video conferencing. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.