M3POC: A Multimedia Multicast Transport Protocol for Cooperative Applications

Recent experiments in collaborative working have shown some technical limitations that delay the massive deployment of such applications. These limitations concern the support of a variable multimedia quality of service (QoS) that is often insufficient, multicast services badly adapted to the group requirements, and over all, the cooperative features of persons involved in a group work session that are not taken into account. This paper then proposes an architecture resolving these problems, that relies on a new transport protocol : M3POC. The mechanisms and services provided by this transport are presented and confronted to the exposed problematics, and, as an example, it is shown how a cooperative videoconference application Confort can benefit from such transport service.