On-line communication services were evolving from a simple text-based chats towards sophisticated videopresence appliances. The bandwidth consumption of those services is constantly growing due to the technology development and high user and business needs. That fact leads us to implement optimization mechanisms into the multimedia communication scenarios. In this paper, the authors concentrate on many-to-many (m2m) communication, that is mainly driven by the growing popularity of on-line conferences and telepresence applications. An overlay model where m2m flows are optimally established on top of a given set of network routes is formulated and a joint model where the network routes and the m2m flows are jointly optimized. In the models, the traffic traverses through replica servers, that are responsible for stream aggregation and compression. Models for both predefined replica locations and optimized server settlement are presented. Each model is being followed by a comprehensive description and is based on real teleconference systems.

Peer Reviewed