An Application-level Multicast Architecture for Communications

摘要

In recent years, interactive and real-time multimedia applications such as video teleconferencing and multimedia streaming have become increasingly popular in the Inter-net. The emergence of such applications has creatd two new phenomena: (a) multicast support is becoming critical, since they typically have multiple participants, and (b) the data streams are becoming heterogencours in nature (e.g. a typeical video conference session consists of text data, audio and video streams with differnt improtance). Our target set of applications thus requries sophisticated multimedia support for small to medium multicast groups.