Patent ID: 7688764

Claim:
An apparatus for providing floor control for a communication session involving a plurality of participants and a plurality of nodes associated with the plurality of participants, the apparatus comprising: a first gateway that is configured to assemble a first Real Time Protocol (RTP) Internet Protocol (IP) packet, embed a real time speaker arbitration command to reserve a floor in the first RTP IP packet to produce a real time floor control message, and allocate a first plurality of gateway routing addresses to the communication session; means for receiving a second RTP IP packet; means for creating one or more duplicates of the received second RTP IP packet; means for transmitting the one or more duplicates of the received second RTP IP packet; and a controller coupled to the first gateway that assigns a gateway routing address of the plurality of gateway routing addresses to each node of the plurality of associated nodes, determines that a first node of the plurality of nodes utilizes a first message format that is different than a second message format utilized by each of a second node of the plurality of nodes and a third node of the plurality of nodes, and in response to determining that the second node and third node each utilize a second message format, assigns a second gateway to receive messages from the first gateway, generate duplicates of the received messages, and route the duplicates of the received messages to each of the second node and the third node.