A rendezvous point selection algorithm for videoconferencing applications

Many new multimedia group applications rely on the selection of a rendezvous point on a network at which to hold the meeting. Each participant sends his multimedia data stream through forward paths to this central node, which then broadcasts a virtual videoconference scene through a multicast backward path towards all the participants. We model the optimization of these paths as the shortest path problem and the optimal Steiner tree problem. We propose a heuristic to select a rendezvous point minimizing a weighted sum of forward and backward paths. Computational results are presented showing the performance of our approach.