Digiparty - A decentralized multi-party video conferencing system

Increased speeds of PCs and networks have made media communication possible on the Internet. However, nearly ten years after the first release of Microsoft NetMeeting, Internet video telephony is still limited to the point-to-point communication mode. Today, people have a need for an easy-to-use multi-party video conferencing tool that will connect families and friends around the world over the Internet. In this paper, DigiParty, a fully distributed multi-party video conferencing system, is presented. DigiParty employs full mesh conferencing architecture and adopts a loosely coupled conferencing mode. A novel conference control protocol is designed with the system. DigiParty can be integrated with any existing instant messaging services and is applicable to all types of Internet connections.