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Installation and Upgrade Guide for Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU12 and MCU24 Release 5.1
OL-11897-01
Chapter 1 Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU Functionality
About Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU Topologies
About Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU Topologies
The Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU can work in a centralized or cascaded topology. This
section describes these two options.
Centralized Topology
In a centralized topology, the Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU performs media processing
for all connected terminals. The Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU can handle multiple
conferences simultaneously.
Figure 1-2 Centralized Topology
Cascaded Conferences
The Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU allows you to combine two or more conferences
resulting in a larger conference with many more participants. This is called cascading. Cascading creates
a distributed environment that helps reduce the drain on network resources. In addition, the processing
resources required by the Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU are distributed between
participating MCUs. Costly telephone or ISDN line usage can be further reduced with the mediation of
a gateway.
Cascading occurs when one conference with “x” number of participants invites another conference with
“y” number of participants. The two conferences effectively become one large conference. The
bandwidth required across a cascaded conference link is only that of one audio/video stream between
the two conferences. This is significantly less than the accumulated bandwidth of all the participants.
Each separate Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU unit participating in a conference retains
control of its individual conference resources and participants.
The cascaded conference in Figure 1-3 minimizes the use of network bandwidth while distributing
processing among the participating the Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3515 MCU units.
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