ATM RendezView: Enabling real-time multimedia delivery to-the-desktop.

The advent of highly performant computer technology necessary to process real-time audio and video media streams has recently enabled video conferencing services to migrate to the desktop. Additionally, as networking technologies mature to the point of affording the real-time, high bandwidth transport of these streams, a new breed of distributed multipoint conferencing systems will become widely used. ATM RendezView is a prototype application which takes a radical shift in thinking to provide a high quality, distributed, multiparty video conferencing environment. No longer are media stream bridging, mixing and distribution functions resident in a centrally located Multipoint Control Unit (MCU), but distributed among end-systems. Real-time network services are provided through the use of native Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) connectivity to-the-desktop. Deployment of such a distributed service is consequently less costly than with MCU based systems. ATM is instrumental to the success of the prototype since it provides dynamic point-to-multipoint Switched Virtual Connections (SVC) for media stream distribution, each connection having a negotiable Quality of Service (QoS). Dynamic point-to-multipoint connections empower each conferee to independently choose particular media streams to be received from other conferees, thus affording the function of switched presence control. (Abstract shortened by UMI.