Distributed Conferencing

Prior to distributed conferencing, all participants in a conference call had to be connected to the conference hosted on a single media server. This limited the number of participants in a single conference (resource constraint), and required increased bandwidth because the audio for all the participants was sent to a single media server.

With distributed conferencing, the limitation of connecting all participants together on a single media server has been removed. Media Server and TSServer can now create multiple regional conferences on appropriate media servers and connect the regional conferences together into one larger conference. This happens behind the scenes, so system users won’t notice this change. 

Advantages of distributed conferencing:

• Minimizes WAN bandwidth.
  Instead of all participants sending their audio across the WAN, only the audio to connect the regional conferences together will traverse the WAN.

• Allows media server load balancing.
  Conference participants are no longer required to connect to the same media server, which allows the load to be spread across multiple media servers.

• Allows for larger conferences.

Distributed conferencing completely removes the need for Interaction Conference media servers. Therefore, ICMS has been retired as of SU4.