Specification of GMS System Protocol (GSP) Version 1.0

Group communications require special support for name and address management, QoS support, and connection establishment. The group and session management system (GMS) is a distributed directory system which is specifically designed to support group communication infrastructures. This report briefly introduces the concepts of GMS, the data types available, and then gives the specification of GSP, the GMS system protocol. This protocol is used for communication between GSAs, ie it is used for GMS's internal communication. GSP is specified by state diagrams, time sequence diagrams, textual descriptions, the PDU syntax in ASN.1, and the PDU semantics in comments given for each PDU.