Four-way Video Conference and its Session Control Based on Distributed Mini-MCU in Home Server

This paper presents a method to provide four-way video conference by distributing MCU (Multi-point Control Unit) to one of home network equipments like home server. The distributed mini-MCU consists of a special video conference module and a session manager to initiate and control the additive sessions based on SIP protocol. The media streams from each party are collected and mixed in the video conference module of the home server operating as SIP UAC (User Agent Client). The spatially divided video and three different mixed audio are encoded in MPEG-4 encoders and sent back to participants of SIP UAS (User Agent Server). Based on this mini-MCU, it is possible to provide video conference without any centralized MCUs while maintaining the network bandwidth reduced.