A serverless peer-to-peer (P2P) multi-party real-time audio communication
system and method in which each of the peers takes a turn mixing and
compressing the audio and redelivering the compressed audio. An input
audio stream is divided or split into frames. At each frame, one peer
node is selected to mix and redeliver the audio to the remainder of the
peers in the network. The number of frames mixed and redelivered by a
certain peer is proportional to its available resources (such as the
upload bandwidth or computational power). The P2P audio communication
system and method flexibly balances the load of the peers, such that
peers having more resources are able to assist peers having fewer
resources. This enables the P2P audio communication system and method to
conduct a multi-party audio communication session without the need for
powerful servers or peers.