Network Support for Group Coordination

Recent advances in computer hardware and networking technology have incited the deployment of wide-area streaming media services in the Internet. While such efforts as video-on-demand are largely limited to unidirectional delivery of content to the desktop, synchronously interactive group-oriented application services are foreseeable. In such applications, users collaborate on a shared workspace and freely exchange information in real-time under the premise of coordination and conflict freedom. Telecollaborative applications such as telemedicine or distance learning may profit from such coordination services. Ultimately, group coordination allows for groupware-style computing at Internet scope. The current IP-multicast framework contains provisions for group membership control and reliable dissemination services, however, it lacks support for group coordination. In this paper, we present a framework on network control and coordination functions to orchestrate synchronous multimedia groupwork. Our goal is to achieve a better understanding of the group coordination problem as an important component of future Internet multimedia collaboration tools.