Low-cost SBC cards to provide multipoint to multimedia communications sessions

Multipoint distribution of real-time video constitutes a challenge for the research in the current Internet, mainly due to the poor dissemination of IP Multicast. The target of this paper is to define a low-cost flexible multipoint communication platform for the users of video sessions, which scales for a large number of communication groups with a small number of members. This paper proposes a software-based platform to provide multipoint communications in a heterogeneous unicast/multicast environment. It is constituted by a number of S-MCUs (software MCUs). Each S-MCU runs on a low-cost single board computer (SBC) and is implemented like a software router by using Click. Design, implementation and performance issues are discussed by a comparative numerical analysis at both packet level and application level.