Distance learning using IP multicast

As the Internet and Internet technologies storm the world of communications, economic forces are driving IP to provide services well beyond what was originally intended. The simple flexible IP service model and the avoidance of the burdensome regulatory/contractual legacy of telephony have resulted in ubiquitous reach and greater economies. IP multicast promises to bring the same to group communications. Distance learning and teleconferencing is still mostly based on traditional telephony solutions where centralized conference bridges using ISDN still dominate. Although some solution providers offer facilities to use IP as transport, even H.323 based conferencing offers remain centralized with point-to-point connections to each participant. In this paper we describe our experimentation with teleconferencing and distance learning infrastructure based on our novel lightweight IP multicast. We moreover describe how we have exploited our multicast and smart routers to implement distributed scalable teleconferencing for H.323 clients.