This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project aims to create a peer-to-peer protocol that will cope with the challenges of supporting easy-to-deploy, large-scale audio communication solutions in the rapidly growing areas of social networking environments and online games. Today, the challenges prohibiting peer-to-peer audio communication on a large-scale consists of managing the dynamic nature of users joining and leaving and bandwidth management and optimization, enabling the creation of high quality audio and market-acceptable latency. The protocol and subsequent end-user applications that this project is developing aim to meet these challenges. A successful deployment with existing social networking sites will add significant value to their current offerings. The business opportunity is magnified due to the peer-to-peer nature of the protocol which requires minimal up-front infrastructure investments and manageable integration effort to roll out the technology. The proposed architecture aims to be a significant breakthrough that will elevate online communication within large group social sites from its current form of text chatting to a level that is closer to direct person-to-person contact
