Investigating the performance of audio/video service architecture I: single broker

Increasing network bandwidth and computing power provide new opportunities for videoconferencing systems over Internet. The number of homes and small offices with broadband Internet connections are increasing rapidly. Even cell phones have broadband Internet access in the near future. Therefore, it is not inconceivable to imagine that the trend in the increasing usage of videoconferencing systems continue by accelerating. This requires universally accessible and scalable videoconferencing systems that can deliver thousands of concurrent audio and video streams. However, developing videoconferencing systems over Internet is a challenging task, since audio and video distribution requires high bandwidth and low latency. Current videoconferencing systems such as IP-multicast and H.323 can not fully address the problem of scalability and universal accessibility. We propose service oriented architecture for videoconferencing, GlobalMMCS, and use an event brokering middleware, NaradaBrokering, to deliver real-time audio and video streams to high number of users. The performance of the event brokering network is critical to the success of this videoconferencing system. In this paper, we provide comprehensive analysis of a NaradaBrokering broker in the context of audio/video delivery. The results provide guidelines for the deployment of GlobalMMCS in particular, and they provide useful insights for the feasibility of using software based audio/video delivery systems in general