Innovative server-based multicast VoIP teleconference system

Teleconferencing, an essential feature in any commercial telephone system, increases productivity while reducing travel costs and saving travel time. A teleconference allows colleagues to conduct a virtual meeting without traveling to a common location. However, a large-scale VolP teleconference consumes a substantial amount of network bandwidth, and a drastic reduction in available network bandwidth could severely impact the QoS of everything on the network. In a VoIP teleconference system, the designers face not only the common VolP challenges but also the significant challenge of providing a teleconference feature that can support a large-scale teleconference without using excessive bandwidth. This paper presents an innovative, bandwidth-efficient way of implementing a real-time VolP teleconference system. This new method provides all of the features that existing teleconference systems provide, but this new approach consumes considerably less data bandwidth than existing systems require. The new system allows a network with a given capacity to accommodate almost double the number of conference participants that an existing system would allow.