Computer Networks Division
Project Overview

Responsible Conferencing: Congestion Control for High Quality Media (CCHQM)

Principal Investigator: Ladan Gharai

Summary:

The promise of teleconferencing systems is to support distributed meetings, collaborative work, seminars, lectures, tutorials and training using the facilities provided by the next generation Internet. Teleconferencing systems are a combination of a number of different technologies: audio and video compression, capture and display, networking and real-time systems. These technologies have all progressed much in recent years, leading to widespread deployment of conferencing. With the current integration of flexible conferencing APIs and components into the Windows environment, it is expected that development will become easier and we will see further proliferation of teleconferencing environments.

There are, however, two potential problems that may hinder the widespread deployment of teleconferencing systems: divergence in support for codecs and media formats, and the lack of widespread congestion control. This has the potential to both disrupt the conferencing experience and to cause instability and congestion in the Internet. Neither of these are desirable outcomes.

The CCHQM project aims to address these issues, facilitating interaction between the Windows teleconferencing environment, the Access Grid, and the UltraGrid high definition conferencing system we are developing.

The project will also investigate congestion control algorithms and the integration of these into the RTP protocol and ConferenceXP system. In particular, we will consider options for the integration of TFRC-like congestion control into the ConferenceXP system.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Microsoft Corporation. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Microsoft Corporation.

Sponsor: Microsoft Corporation