Communication structures and paradigms for distributed conferencing applications

Communication paradigms and structures for workstation software supporting distributed conferencing applications is discussed. The communication system supports an abstraction of event clusters in which the various events generated by an application activity are bundled into one composite event. The communication and synchronization requirements for implementing the event cluster framework are identified and specified as ordering constraints on the individual events in various clusters. Two types of ordering are identified: causal ordering that is application specifiable, and total ordering that is system imposed. Two application models-multiplayer game and designer workbench-that are representative of many multiuser conferencing applications are introduced