Method of handling a group communication in a communications network and a computer software product, a network client, and a communication system therefor

Abstract

The application relates to a method of handling a group communication in a communications network, comprising the steps of agreeing and arranging participating clients of a group; establishing a communication session for directed exchanging of streamed media between the participating clients, coordinating communication resources, especially the direction of exchanging of streamed media, i.e. re-assigning a communication resource to a client when this clients has requested this communication resource, where the clients are symmetrically organized as peers in the communication network, i.e. there is no distinguished (centralized) client but a distributed system of peers (P, P, P), where a peer to peer network among the participating clients is established for coordinating the direction of exchanging of streamed media by electing at least one participating peer (P, P, P) of said group of participating peers (P, P, P) as a source peer; and piping the streamed media originated by the at least one participating peer (P, P, P) to the participating peers via the peer to peer network, and coordinating the mutual exclusive communication resources by initiating an election by a request ('), and resolving the concurrent request (′) fair and alive by a distributed election algorithm between the peers using the peer to peer network. The invention also relates to a computer software product, a network client, and a communication system therefor.