Homer conferencing - A multimedia test bed for various experiments and measurements

Transferring multimedia data from and to customers is one of the biggest challenges of current network engineering. A key challenge, researchers are confronted with, is to understand what kind of real-time support is needed, what the network could provide to the application and how the application could utilize codecs, quality settings and transmission protocols in order to assure the service. In this paper we introduce the open source software Homer-Conferencing (HC) as multimedia test bed for research purposes. Our approach was developed during the last four years. The main goal of our work is to allow researchers implementing deep analysis of multiple kinds of multimedia traffic. For this purpose, exchangeable codecs and adjustable transmission qualities can be used in a video conferencing application. In this paper, we describe the architecture of HC and highlight based on selected experiments the benefits the HC system provides for experiments and measurements in currently used networks as well as future Internet platforms.