An Application-level Multicast Architecture for Multimedia Communications

In recent years, interactive and real-time multimedia applications such as video teleconferencing and multimedia streaming have become increasingly popular in the Internet. The emergence of such applications has created two new phenomena: (a) multicast support is becoming critical, since they typically have multiple participants, and (b) the data streams are becoming heterogeneous in nature (e.g. a typical video conference session consists of text data, audio and video streams with different importance). Our target set of applications thus requires sophisticated multimedia support for small to medium multicast groups