2.4 Kb/sec Compressed Domain Teleconference Bridge with Universal Transcoder

Advanced new technologies, such as cellular-telephone-quality ultra-low-rate speech coders, model domain transcoders, and compressed domain conferencing algorithms provide an opportunity to develop a compressed domain conference bridge system for use in secure, survivable military communications environments. The new conference bridge will allow seamless interoperability with diverse voice terminals and enable fullduplex teleconference operation. Unlike users of half-duplex systems, conferencing participants will be able to talk at the same time and hear the two most relevant simultaneous talkers over a single 2.4 KBPS connection. This paper describes a system architecture that implements the features mentioned above. Compared to conventional multicast conferencing algorithms, the new system will consume a significantly smaller portion of the satellite resources; for N conference participants, conventional multicast requires N channels, while the new system will use only 2N channels.