HW audio conferencing: Having 8-participant and 16-participant on same DSP

[Nadav]

Hi,

I have a 29xx router (relatively modern IOS) with a single PVDM3-16. It's the media resource for a CUCM.

According to the DSP calculator, a single PVDM3-16 for a low complexity codec can support either:

i) 8*8-party conferences

ii) 6*8-party conferences AND 1*16-party conference

1) Is this a flexible allocation of resources? Meaning if I configure under the dspfarm that there are a maximum of 16 participants and 8 sessions, would it allow either of those situations based on whether a conference with more than 8 participants is going on or not?

2) Can I configure the maximum number of 16-party sessions that can happen at a time, so that I save resources for as many 8-party sessions? Otherwise 4*16-party conferences will take up all the resources and fewer groups can start up a conference.

Thanks for the help in advance!

[Jaime Valencia]

Nope, this is static allocation, CUCM will attempt to reserve whatever values you have under the service parameters for conferencing and fail if there are not enough resources in the CFB.

[Nadav]

Thanks Jaime. 

I read about an option called "Advanced ad hoc conferencing" which allows the chanining of ad-hoc conferences. I suppose it could be used to chain two 8-party conferences if I understood the gist of it. However, I can't seem to find a good explaination of how it's implemented at the user level.

If I have 16 phones, each with a single DN, how can this feature be used to create a single 16-party conference if the bridge is configured to allow only 8 per session? Does one phone need to have 2 DN's, and then have an 8-party conference on each DN before merging them using some softkey?

Thanks!