Reconfiguration in tightly-coupled conferencing environments

An efficient conference service facilitates the implementation and run-time control of conference applications. Beside key features of a conference service like conference management, multipoint communication support, and application state synchronization, the reconfiguration of such environments is crucial for the scalability and availability of the service. The paper proposes a reconfiguration mechanism for the Scalable Conferencing Control Service (SCCS) to add the functionality to this service for tightly-coupled conferences. The proposed scheme allows the reconfiguration of running conferences to optimize the system during runtime without blocking the conference during the reconfiguration. The consistency awareness is shown as well as the determination of the costs in terms of time needed for the operation.