Hierarchical teleconferencing on the Internet

In this paper, a web-enabled teleconferencing is proposed based on hierarchical management strategy. Client-server paradigm is adopted for the implementation of this collaborative application. The prototype developed is represented by a tree structure with main server as the root and local servers as its nodes. Each node is further fragmented into branches representing the local users, servers, and participants. In this structure, the leaves are the conferees and intermediate nodes are the administrators. This allows maintaining minimum conference traffic on the network. The conference presentation is carried out in an interactive multicasting operation mode over the Internet. The teleconference system is aimed to support text, audio, and video streams and to monitor the activities of the participants by analysis of their face images