A scalable distributed architecture for multi-party conferencing using SIP

As various multimedia communication services are increasingly required by Internet users, several signaling protocols have been proposed for the efficient control of complex multimedia communication services. However, the model and architecture of multi-party conferencing which is currently being standardized by IETF has some limitation in scalability to meet the requirement for the management of large-scale multimedia conferencing service. In this article, we have presented a new scalable distributed architecture for the efficient management of large-scale multimedia conferencing service which is based on SIP. The high scalability is achieved by adding, deleting and modifying the multiple mixers and composing conference server network in a distributed way, in a real-time, and without disruption of services. The SIP-based control mechanism for achieving the scalability has been designed in detail. Finally, the performance of the proposed architecture has been evaluated by simulation.