Multicast for multimedia collaborative applications: services and mechanisms

This paper presents new end-to-end multicast services for multimedia collaborative applications. In particular, issues investigated include error control, congestion control, flow control, and security. The proposed multicast services can be built atop IP multicast or a best effort overlay multicast. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we determine the required services and we propose a simple interface to provide them. Second, we investigate mechanisms how these services can be implemented. Our solutions take into considerations the heterogeneity of the environment in which the applications are running along with their special characteristics and specific demands from the network layer.