Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins, and Allison Mankin
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Internet Computing,
Las Vegas, NV, USA,
June 2002.
Much work has focused on the problems of small group communication and
of one-to-many broadcast, while issues in large scale interactive
networked teleconferences have received less attention. In this paper,
we consider the problems inherent in conducting large scale
conferences: teleconferences with hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of
active participants. The lessons learnt from our design for a digital
amphitheater – a system based on active agents, where about one hundred
remote participants can conference together – are discussed. In that
system we successfully overcame end system limitations by off-loading
some processing into the network, thus creating parallelism and
reducing the bottleneck inherent in the serial nature of the hosts
managing each display. We expand on this architecture, further
exploring parallelism by pushing functions from individual end systems,
to clusters and the network, with the aim of scaling to thousands of
users.
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