Considerations for deploying a geographically distributed video conferencing system

In this paper we report on our ongoing work to improve the user experience of video conferencing by using geolocation. We discuss the problem of selecting a media server for a video conference, introduce one state-of-the-art system which uses a simple method, and discuss a model for distributing a conference among a set of media servers. We perform a measurement study of a production service, and find that in many cases, contrary to common wisdom, connecting each participant to their closest server is not only costly, but counter-productive in terms of decreasing the round-trip time. While, the approach may still seem viable in some use cases, more research is needed in order to understand when that may be, and define specific algorithms for server selection in the case of a distributed media conference.