Videoconferencing on the Internet

Abstract

This paper describes the INRIA videoconferencing system (IVS), a low bandwidth tool for real-time video between workstations on the Internet using UDP datagrams and the IP multicast extension. The video coder-decoder (codec) is a software implementation of the ITU-T recommendation H.261 originally developed for the integrated services digital network (ISDN). Our focus is on adapting this codec for the Internet environment. We propose a packetization scheme, an error control scheme and an output rate control scheme that adapts the image coding process based on network conditions. This work shows that it is possible to maintain videoconferences with reasonable quality across packet-switched networks without requiring special support from the network such as resource reservation or admission control.