Eecient Multicasting for Interactive Multimedia Applications

A speciic class of multimedia applications is expected to be of importance for future communication networks: Multi-Party Interactive Multimedia (MIM). Based on the isolation and characterization of MIM applications, concrete network support requirements are derived in this paper. The varying degree of connectivity, the vastly diierent sizes in terms of participants and the reliance on a guaranteed Quality of Service make MIM support a diicult problem. Starting with the deenition of mul-timedia communication abstractions, principles of solutions are sketched. For an important subclass of applications a particularly eecient and practicable alternative implementation based on half-duplex channels is introduced. Finally, interfaces at both the transport and network layers are considered.