SFUs

SFU is an acronym with several meanings. The most prominent are Simon Fraser University, a Canadian public research university comprising campuses in Burnaby, Vancouver, and Surrey in British Columbia. Founded in 1965, SFU is known for programs in arts and social sciences, business, science, engineering, and applied sciences, and for research across fields such as health, technology, and urban studies. It operates multiple campuses, with the main campus on Burnaby Mountain and additional campuses that host faculties, research institutes, and student housing. The university engages in partnerships with industry, government, and other academic institutions, and offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as continuing education and online programs.

In the field of real-time communications, SFU stands for Selective Forwarding Unit. An SFU is a type of media server used in multiparty videoconferencing and WebRTC deployments. It receives media streams from participants and forwards a subset of those streams to other participants, rather than mixing them into a single stream. This architecture reduces processing load on the server and can lower bandwidth compared to a full MCU, at the cost of more network hops and possibly variable latency. SFUs are commonly contrasted with Multi-point Control Units (MCUs) that transcode and mix streams. In practice, SFUs enable scalable, low-latency group calls with many participants, particularly in consumer- and enterprise-grade video conferencing platforms.

The acronym SFU may also be used by other organizations or terms, such as other universities or programs that use the initials in English; in context, SFU usually refers to Simon Fraser University or a Selective Forwarding Unit.