Active multicasting for heterogeneous groups

Communication environments are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. This imposes new challenges on communication support for multimedia and collaborative applications. AMnet (Active Multicasting Network) provides multi-point communication support for large-scale groups with heterogeneous receivers. Active Multicasting nodes inside the network include so-called QoS filters that remove information from continuous media streams in order to reduce data rate for low-end receivers without affecting high-end receivers. A prototype implementation of AMnet based on RSVP is presented with some first performance results.