Scalable conferencing support for tightly-coupled environments: services, mechanisms, and implementation design

Distributed conferencing applications have become more and more popular. Progress in communication systems and increased functionality of these applications are the main pushing factors from a technical point of view. The increasing costs and distribution of institutions are the pulling factors from a user's point of view. Key features of group communication applications are conference management, multipoint communication, distributed application synchronization, and user data marshaling. These features are mostly independent from specific scenarios. Thus, it is useful to provide a generic service to accelerate and simplify the development of such applications. For global usage in the Internet, scalability in terms of group size and distribution of the entities is a big issue in the design of such services. The paper defines requirements for a scalable conferencing service introducing the services as well as the protocol mechanisms. Finally, the implementation design of the service is presented.