Multi-party Videoconferencing Based on Hybrid Multicast with Peer-Forwarding

Multi-party videoconferencing is one many-to-many group communication application in which multicast could be utilized to save bandwidth. For native multicast is still not available everywhere, we need provide scalable and efficient way for unicast users to communicate with multicast-capable users in videoconferencing. This paper proposes one scalable hybrid multicast scheme with peer-forwarding for multi-party videoconferencing. The multicast-capable users are designed as peers to forward data as reflectors do. The group communication mechanisms of hybrid multicast with reflector-based and peer-based data forwarding are introduced. Session management, connection building between peers and unicast users, and terminal functions are introduced. We implement the videoconferencing system based on hybrid multicast and applied it on CERNET backbone. The applications and experiments show that the scheme is feasible and valid.