A multipoint communication service for interactive applications

The multipoint communication layer (MCL) is a generic multipoint communication service designed to support highly interactive multimedia conferencing applications. It supports full-duplex multipoint communication between an arbitrary number of connected locations over a variety of networks. MCL design was driven by the demanding real-time multipoint communication requirements of MICA (multimedia interactive conferencing application). The authors establish the context for MCL by considering MICA´s communication requirements and reviewing related work in the area of multipoint communication. They present the overall design of the MCL service and describe its communication primitives, protocol message structures, and implementation. Comparison is made with alternative strategies and the use of MCL services for other applications is examined