Alexander Knauf: P2P Virtualization for Conference Management

An increasing number of popular conferencing applications operate in a lightweight, infrastructure-independent ad hoc fashion. These P2P-type systems raise the demand for scalable, adaptive self organization of conferencing in a standard-compliant way. The traditional approach for conference signaling uses a central point of control called focus, which limits scalability and presents a single point of failure.

We alter this centralized paradigm using a SIP-based approach for distributed conference management in a Peer-to-Peer environment. The protocol defines different roles for multi-party controllers by distributing the locators for a conference focus in a transparent fashion. To maintain a consistent view among the focus peers, we extend the Event Package for Conference State to meet multi-focus demands and make use of the P2PSIP overlay to virtualize the focus identifier.