A conference control protocol for highly interactive video-conferencing

Video-conferencing is an efficient tool for distributed collaboration. With the wider availability of broadband wide area networks, such as the Internet2, we can expect an increasing demand for video-conferences conducted over broadband wide area networks. We present a conference control protocol for a highly interactive conference paradigm and its collaboration environment. In such a collaboration environment, a fixed number of channels (three) for multimedia traffic, as well as a common control channel, are used. We propose a conference control protocol that uses a three-channel rotation floor control scheme to coordinate access to the shared media channels and avoid race conditions. Experimental results, as well as the implementation in a research video-conferencing system for wide area networks, show that the proposed protocol can effectively eliminate race conditions while maintaining scalability and reliability.