Multiple multicast groups for multimedia on the Internet

The use of large-scale multimedia applications has escalated in recent years. Distributed object frameworks such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture are being deployed to cater this market. We argue however, that CORBA is lacking for large-scale multimedia applications requiring timely guarantees. The Real-Time Wide Area Network dissemination Architecture is a framework for distributing multimedia using dynamically tailored protocol stacks and multiple multicast groups over the Internet. RWANDA improves the quality of reception within heterogeneous receivers by allowing each receiver to subscribe to a one or more QoS multicast groups according to its resources. It overcomes network congestion and heterogeneity using multiple multimedia multicast groups and the dynamic construction of protocol stocks allow receivers to process messages with no prior knowledge of the senders configuration. Protocol details are presented in this article with experimental and simulation results to back our claims