Multiparty video conferencing in virtual path based ATM networks

With effective bandwidth concept encapsulating cell-level behavior, ATM network design and analysis at the call-level may be formulated in the framework of circuit-switched loss networks. We develop an analytical framework for a kind of multiparty video conferencing in the VP based ATM network at the call-level. For this kind of conference, only the video of the current speaker is broadcast to other conferees. The voice is unrestricted. We first formulate a traffic model for the conferences. Since an exact analysis of such a multiparty conference network is mathematically intractable, an approximate analysis for such conferences in a fully connected VP network is performed. Our study shows that the proposed analysis can give accurate prediction of the blocking probabilities for new conference calls as well as video freeze probabilities for on-going conferences