Traditionally, floor control protocols orchestrate access to the constituent media channels of a distributed conference. A potential benefit of the exclusivity of channel access is efficient network utilization because only the sources that are ``granted the floor'' are allowed to transmit media and consume network bandwidth. SCUBA can further enhance existing floor control protocols by providing the mechanism for throttling media sources in response to floor control activity. For example, if the floor control protocol determines that some source has been granted the floor, then all the receivers could simply register interest in that source via SCUBA. As a result, the active source would increase its transmission rate as is desired. This approach obviates the need to intertwine the floor control protocol directly with source's rate adjustment algorithm. In addition, the method by which the floor configuration is mapped onto sending rates is not fixed at each source, but rather can be tuned at each individual receiver.
Alternatively, a floor control tool might directly control the source's sending rate. For example, once the floor control tool ``grants the floor'' to a particular source, that source could begin transmitting at the rate appropriate to the ``holder of the floor'' and all other sources would immediately limit their rate. Once this transition has occurred, the sources continue adjusting their transmission rates according to the SCUBA reports. Since the holder of the floor will in general be the source of interest, SCUBA reports will only confirm what has already occurred in the session: that the floor holder should receive the highest bandwidth share. Thus, through the use of the floor protocol, we have decreased the convergence time by using the floor control directive to ``guess'' the next bandwidth partition. Between floor control actions, SCUBA could continue to adapt dynamically to fine-grained changes in receiver interest. In short, SCUBA can effectively augment floor control protocols through the integration of receiver interest.