Peer-to-peer multipoint videoconferencing on the Internet

A peer-to-peer architecture for multipoint videoconferencing is presented. Each conference participant may have asymmetric and dissimilar bandwidth connections to the Internet. The solution does not require additional hardware, as in multipoint control units, or network infrastructure support such as multicast. Without creating any additional demand on the networking and computing resources needed for a point-to-point videoconference, this architecture can extend it into a multipoint one. A protocol for a completely distributed implementation has been developed and tested on a prototype system extending a point-to-point video phone to a multipoint one. The architecture of the prototype system along with the details of the protocol optimization is discussed. Several performance results are presented.