Service-Oriented Architecture for Building a Scalable Videoconferencing System

The availability of increasing network bandwidth and the computing power provides new opportunities for videoconferencing systems over Internet. On one hand, broadband Internet connections are spreading rapidly. Even cell phones will have broadband internet access in the near future with the implementations of 3G standards. On the other hand, the usage of webcams and video camera enabled PDAs and cell phones are increasing by many millions every year. This requires universally accessible and scalable videoconferencing systems that can deliver thousands of concurrent audio and video streams. In addition to audio and video delivery, such systems should provide scalable media processing services such as transcoding, audio mixing, video merging, etc. to support increasingly diverse set of clients. However, developing videoconferencing systems over Internet is a challenging task, since audio and video communications require high bandwidth and low latency. In addition, the processing of audio and video streams is computing intensive. Therefore, it is particularly difficult to develop scalable systems that support high number of users with various capabilities. Current videoconferencing systems such as IP-Multicast and H.323 can not fully address the problem of scalability and universal accessibility. These systems designed to deliver the best performance and lacks flexible service oriented architecture to support increasingly diverse clients with various network and device capabilities. We believe that with the advancements in computing power and network bandwidth, more flexible and service oriented systems should be developed to manage audio and video conferencing systems. In this paper, we propose a service oriented architecture for videoconferencing, GlobalMMCS, based on a publish/subscribe event brokering network, NaradaBrokering.