A control criteria to optimize collaborative document and multimedia conferencing bandwidth requirements

The ability to hold real-time collaborative document and multimedia conferencing has now become a reality, especially with the availability of high bandwidth networks like ATM and FDDI. However, to hold such a conference interactively on the more common networks like Ethernet may place great stress on available bandwidth. Therefore, it will be of great advantage, both, from the cost point of view, as well as the widespread availability of such networks to create a control criteria which can optimize bandwidth requirements for collaborative document and multimedia conferencing. Also, the bandwidth requirements must not increase as the number of conference participants increase. This will ensure the growth of having conference networks that can even span the globe, like using the Internet. This paper proposes a control criteria which will enable such conferences to take place using bandwidths below 1 Mbits.