Network specifications for a virtual space teleconferencing system

This note outlines the network requirements to provide a flexible experimentation environment for a special video/visual teleconferencing system. To make this as selfcontained as possible Section 2 will provide a description of the conferencing environment. This will carefully define the concept of a 'virtual space', a 'pseudo virtual space', and various 'partial virtual spaces'. Each of these conferencing environments imposes different requirements on the interconnecting nodal network. Section 3 will describe the connectivities, capacities, and switching requirements for each of the conferencing environments. Section 4 will introduce a set of canonical network topologies and capabilities that can be configured to satisfy the requirements of the various spaces. Section 5 describes in more detail the requirements and a potential design for a local network to support a cluster of teleconferencing nodes. Section 6 describes the internodal network. Section 7 describes the cluster controller for the system. Finally Section 8 describes the requirements for a demonstration network. Section 9 concludes and Section 10 suggests future research.