A coordination architecture for Internet groupwork

This paper discusses a group coordination architecture to support Internet-wide distributed collaboration in the context of legacy Internet protocols. Group coordination in distributed systems and multimedia systems has many faces manifested in a variety of user interfaces and network protocols. To date, no standardized methodology for engineering group coordination protocols exists. We perceive coordination as the third complementary component in the trinity of group-communication services, next to membership and dissemination. With the current surge in e-commerce and Web-leveraged information exchange among users, the need for systems offering better telepresence and interaction capabilities becomes tangible. Services to support distributed group interaction at (near) real-time, with user-specified quality-of-service, and at Internet scope are of particular interest in this mosaic of telepresence and remote collaboration. We propose a general group coordination architecture for heterogeneous networks, as a framework to leverage the rapid development of group-oriented distributed collaborative applications in the Internet, for example for distance education, distributed scientific simulation or visualization, and similar applications