SRMCA: A Scalable and Resilient Real-time Multi-party Communication Architecture

Abstract

This paper proposes a scalable and resilient real-time multi-party communication architecture for the delivery of mixed media streams, for which content centric networking, with its intelligent network layer, is chosen for implementation to address the shortcomings of the current IP-based Internet architecture. Content centric networking (CCN) represents one of the major proposals targeting future Internet architecture, and is typically optimized for non-realtime content delivery. Proposed research in this paper addresses the architectural challenges for large-scale deployment of CCN to serve real-time applications from the perspective of a multi-party video conferencing framework, with the necessary architectural components to support application- and system-level objectives, in regards to quality of experience, resource utilization, and scalability. We present an in-depth analysis of the proposed architecture by first providing an analytical driven study for the system, and then demonstrating its performance by emulating the architecture over a test-bed with a large number of participants involved in many-to-many communication sessions. The results suggest that the proposed architecture can scale well above 50 participants without incurring significant penalty in signaling, communication, and computing overheads, with capability to support 100 or more participants.