M3POC: a multimedia multicast transport protocol for cooperative applications

Recent experiments in collaborative working have shown some technical limitations that delay the deployment of such applications. The support of variable multimedia quality of service (QoS) is often insufficient, multicast services are badly adapted to the group requirements, and overall, the co-operative features of persons involved in a group work session are not taken into account. The paper then proposes an architecture solving these problems, based on a new transport protocol, M3POC. Mechanisms and services provided by this transport protocol are presented according to the related problem. We then focus on improvements due to the multicast partial reliability and order concept applied to multiple consecutive multimedia connections