Efficient support for multiparty communication

Abstract

Communication of multimedia data among multiple parties can be costly in terms of use of network resources if guaranteed quality of service is requested. We believe, however, that knowledge of the functional characteristics of real applications can be helpful to devise new mechanisms to support isochronous communication efficiently. In this paper we follow this approach to introduce a new communication abstraction, called the Half-Duplex Real-Time channel. The new abstraction can reduce the amount of resources needed by real-time protocols to offer guaranteed performance networking by exploiting the interaction patterns typical of multimedia applications such as tele-conferencing and tele-education.