Number of floors for a voice-only conference on packet networks - a conjecture

Voice conferencing is an essential block of any multimedia system used for collaborative work, as voice is shared by all participants. Floor control is mission-critical here and has been investigated by many to ensure fair resource sharing; yet fixing the number of floors has remained an open problem. A conferee (participant in a conference) can speak only after acquiring the floor. To allow impromptu speech, floor allocation must be made for many concurrent speakers. However, too many concurrent speakers degrade voice intelligibility. Therefore, setting an upper bound for the number of streams (floors) that may be mixed is sine qua non for quality conferencing. The problem of setting an upper bound on the number of floors to support concurrent multi-party audio sessions is addressed. A conjecture based on conversational and qualitative analysis is proposed. A pseudo-measure termed ´loudness number´ used to manage the number of floors is briefly outlined. The implementation at a functional level on Windows/spl copy/ systems has yielded satisfactory performance.