Design Considerations for a Multicast Communication Framework

In the last years, networked multimedia multipoint applications have been developed in conjunction with emerging broadband networks. Experiences have shown that existing transport systems support these applications only insufficiently, since they offer no assistance for real-time multimedia and multipoint applications. In this paper, we propose a Multicast Communication Framework (MCF) which satisfies the needs of multimedia multipoint applications. MCF covers both transportation and presentation of multimedia data. It guarantees quality of service (QoS) for the complete path between multimedia sources and multimedia sinks. Furthermore, it offers a high-level abstraction of multicast communication services that hides the details of the underlying endsystems and networks.