Multicast communication in networks with arbitrary topology

The number of applications requiring one-to-many communication facilities is growing. The authors discuss various aspects of the overall problem `one-to-many´ communication. They study necessary functionalities required from the communication subsystem, i.e. layers 2 and 3 of the OSI-RM, to support such applications. While focussing on the integration of group addresses into OSI´s standard addressing format the authors also touch on evaluation criteria for multicast strategies, give a brief throughput analysis for special multipoint ARQ protocols and present a survey of multicast routing algorithms and their special problems