Cisco 3545 MCU - Manual (Page 14)

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Installation and Upgrade Guide for Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3545 MCU Releases 5.6 and 5.7
OL-17013-01
Chapter 1 Functionality
About Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3545 MCU Topologies
Figure 1-2 Centralized Topology
Cascaded Conferences
The Cisco Unified Videoconferencing 3545 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 3545 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 3545 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 3545 MCU units.
200844
MCU
Site 1 Site 2
Headquarters
MCU MCU