Patent ID: 7760659

Claim:
A distributed optimization system for multicast data, comprising: a memory: a processor coupled to the memory; a data source on the memory configured as one of multiple video conference members in a multicast video conference, wherein each member in the multicast video conference is a data source communicating video conference data to other video conference members via a communication network, the data source maintaining a complete member list; a multicast tree generated by a local greedy algorithm, wherein the multicast tree is controlled and maintained by the data source; the multicast tree configured to add a new video conference data recipient by determining a least transmission latency to transmit video and audio data from the data source to the new video conference data recipient, wherein when bandwidth is unavailable for the new video conference data recipient, a request to add the new video conference data recipient is queued until the bandwidth becomes available; and an optimization logic generated for each data source in the multicast video conference, configured to: determine an end-to-end transmission delay from the data source to each of the video conference members; determine available bandwidth between the data source and each of the video conference members; and optimize a data communication configuration for the data source according to the end-to-end transmission delay and the available bandwidth corresponding to each video conference member, wherein an optimization step comprises refining data communication configuration of the data source in the multicast video conference; wherein, based on the end-to-end transmission delay and the available bandwidth, the refining comprises an intra-tree refinement, wherein a node of the multicast tree is re-arranged to a new parent node within the multicast tree and children of the new parent node are re-arranged in response.