The impact of scaling on a multimedia connection architecture

Abstract

As the last two meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have shown, Internet teleconferencing has arrived. Packet audio and video have now been multicast to approximately 170 different hosts in 10 countries, and for the November 1992 meeting the number of remote participants is likely to be substantially larger. Yet the network infrastructure to support wide scale packet teleconferencing is not in place.

This paper discusses the impact of scaling on our efforts to define a multimedia teleconferencing architecture. Three scaling dimensions of particular interest include: (i) very large numbers of participants per conference, (ii) many simultaneous teleconferences, and (iii) a widely dispersed user population. Here we present a strawman architecture and describe how conference-specific information is captured, then conveyed among end-systems. We provide a comparison of connection models and outline the tradeoffs and requirements that change as we travel along each dimension of scale.