PeerTalk: A Peer-to-Peer Multiparty Voice-over-IP System

Abstract

Multiparty voice-over-IP (MVolP) services allow a group of people to freely communicate with each other via the Internet, which have many important applications such as online gaming and teleconferencing. In this paper, we present a peer-to-peer MVolP system called peerTalk. Compared to traditional approaches such as server-based mixing, peerTalk achieves better scalability and failure resilience by dynamically distributing the stream processing workload among different peers. Particularly, peerTalk decouples the MVolP service delivery into two phases: mixing phase and distribution phase. The decoupled model allows us to explore the asymmetric property of MVolP services (for example, distinct speaking/listening activities and unequal inbound/outbound bandwidths) so that the system can better adapt to distinct stream mixing and distribution requirements. To overcome arbitrary peer departures/ failures, peerTalk provides lightweight backup schemes to achieve fast failure recovery. We have implemented a prototype of the peerTalk system and evaluated its performance using both a large-scale simulation testbed and a real Internet environment. Our initial implementation demonstrates the feasibility of our approach and shows promising results: peerTalk can outperform existing approaches such as P2P overlay multicast and coupled distributed processing for providing MVolP services.