Materialising a new architecture for a distributed MCU in the Cloud

•We propose a distributed architecture for video conferencing servers (MCUs).•The MCU is divided into simple parts that broadcast streams, OneToManys.•We describe and evaluate the new control architecture that allows distributed deployment.•This solution provides improved scalability and deployment granularity.

New technologies are making videoconferencing more ubiquitous than ever. This imposes a big challenge for scaling software MCUs, the traditional videoconferencing servers. We propose, implement and test an architecture for a distributed MCU designed to be deployed in a Cloud Computing environment. The main design idea is to break monolithic MCUs into more simple parts: broadcasters. These broadcasters can be deployed independently on the fly. This achieves a higher deployment granularity and flexibility. We describe the control architecture that allows this distribution and prove the viability of the system with a fully developed implementation.