Randomized routing in multi-party internet video conferencing

Abstract

Despite significant advances, supporting high-quality large video conferences at a low cost remains a significant challenge due to stringent performance requirements, limited and heterogeneous client resources, and dynamic traffic demands. In this paper, we develop a simple yet effective valiant multicast routing to select application-layer routes and adapt streaming rates according to the current network condition. It consists of four novel components: (i) a valiant multicast routing using two random choices to effectively balance the load in the presence of uncertainty about the clients' load, (ii) a scheme to cluster clients based on their delay and adapt valiant multicast routing based on both upload capacity and locality, (iii) an approach to further leverage resources from other peers or nodes in content distribution network (CDN) to enhance performance, and (iv) a simple distributed scheme to adapt streaming rates according to the current network resources. Our real implementation and experiments show that our approach significantly out-performs existing multicast routing schemes and quickly adapts to changing traffic demands and network conditions.