Darkcube: A k-Hypercube based P2P VoIP protocol

Abstract

We propose a new peer-to-peer voice-over-IP (VoIP) protocol, called Darkcube, which builds upon a k-hypercube topology presenting interesting properties regarding multi-party VoIP conferencing. This new topology is based on multiple hypercubes isolating the speaker nodes into a main high speed hypercube and efficiently retransmitting to the remaining listener nodes guaranteeing a good conversational voice communication quality among all users and achieving a great overall user experience. Standard hypercube topologies can present certain performance problems when the number of participants is high; our proposal isolates speakers within a main, low delay, hypercube retransmitting pre-mixed audio to the remaining listening hypercubes improving overall performance and supporting more nodes with better quality than Skype under similar conditions. It is tolerant to common problems on current wireless networks such as high network latencies or temporary network outages, as well as malfunctioning or malicious nodes, making it well suited for its operation on mobile devices.