Optical communication architectures for multimedia conferencing in distributed systems

The design of techniques and protocols for media mixing and communication architectures that optimize the performance of media mixing are discussed. The performance of monostage and multistage techniques for mixing are compared. Centralized and distributed architectures are analyzed for their suitability to both monostage and multistage media mixing, and hierarchical architectures that significantly reduce bandwidth consumption are presented. Algorithms for designing hierarchies that optimize real-time end-to-end delays and a packet train protocol in which the routing nodes can be used as mixers are proposed.<
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