Allison Mankin, Ladan Gharai, Ron Riley
Maryann Perez Maher & Jaroslav Flidr
USC / Information Sciences Institute
Abstract:
In this paper, we present the design of what we have
termed a Digital Amphitheater (DA). The DA is a
network teleconferencing architecture and application
that aims to assemble together remote participants into a
virtual lecture hall or amphitheater. One
of the main uses that we envision for the DA is that
of hosting a technical conference with hundreds of
remote participants. (In fact we plan to usetheDA
to host a program meeting with roughly 200 remote
attendees.) Although the design of the DA makes
use of existing multicast conferencing technologies,
a new active service architecture was developed to
meet the challenge of working with hundreds of simultaneous
video streams. Low rate video streams
are coalesced in real-time so that each participant
receives only a few video streams, instead of a separate
stream from each participant. The active service
approach includes that DA users dynamically locate
instances of video merge service. The basic design
and architecture of the DA are presented, along with
measurements pertaining to the thesis that the DA
will allows commodity PCs to participate in hundred
sender videoconferences.
