VCNF: A Secure Video Conferencing System Based on P2P Technology

The goal of a video conferencing system is to deliver multimedia data to the conference participants efficiently and securely. To meet the requirement of a video conferencing system over the internet, many issues have to be addressed, such as security, scalability and heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a secure and scalable video conferencing system named VCNF (Video Conference Network Foundation), to support large number of conferencing groups simultaneously with each group has limited members. We use a P2PSIP overlay to store and lookup the user and group contact information. SIP protocol is used to setup media sessions and a new kind of session-- VPN session. We adopt a layered data transfer mechanism which traits different kinds of media-streams as of different importance level. We have implemented the system and analyzed its performance and security. An Internet video-based game based on our platform has also been deployed over the Internet.