Centralized and distributed control for multimedia conferencing

The authors examine the functionality required for network control in a large network supporting multimedia and multipoint. They identify a number of new features required to support multimedia and multipoint, and investigate the impact on protocol. Two alternative designs are defined and compared, one that uses distributed multipoint processing to create a tree configuration and one that uses centralized bridging control in a star configuration. The protocols are verified by simulation and the results are used to characterize their relative complexity and performance. On balance, distributed control is found to provide the best performance, but central control requires less processing complexity