Networked Group Communication

Enabling group communication is one of the major challenges for the future Internet. Various issues ranging from services and applications to protocols and infrastructure have to be addressed. Moreover, they need to be studied from various angles and therefore involve skills in multiple areas. COST264wascreatedtocontributetothisinternationale?orttowardsgroup communication and related technologies. The European COST framework is ideal for establishing a new community of interest, providing an open forum for ideas, and also supporting young researchers in the ?eld. The COST264 action, o?cially started in late 1998, aims at leveraging the European research in this areaandcreatingintensiveinteractionattheinternationallevel.Tothispurpose, COST264 decided to organize an annual technical workshop, the International Workshop on Networked Group Communication. NGC'99 in Pisa is the ?rst event of the series. Despitethisbeingthe?rstworkshopanddespitetheveryshorttimebetween the Call for Papers and the deadline for submissions, and the other con?icting andmoreestablishedevents,theCallforPapersofNGC'99washighlysuccessful: we received 49 papers, of which 18 were selected to compose the basis of the technical program. We hope you will enjoy our paper selection, which is the VI Preface core of these proceedings, and addresses important issues in the research and development of networked group communication. In addition to refereed contributions, we scheduled two keynote speakers (Christophe Diot and Steve Deering), and four invited talks by Ken Birman (Cornell), Bob Briscoe (BT), Radia Perlman (SUN), Tony Speakman (CISCO).

Inhalt
A Preference Clustering Protocol for Large-Scale Multicast Applications.- Layered Multicast Group Construction for Reliable Multicast Communications.- Building Groups Dynamically: A CORBA Group Self-Design Service.- Issues in Designing a Communication Architecture for Large-Scale Virtual Environments.- HyperCast: A Protocol for Maintaining Multicast Group Members in a Logical Hypercube Topology.- Support for Reliable Sessions with a Large Number of Members.- Distributed Core Multicast (DCM): A Multicast Routing Protocol for Many Groups with Few Receivers.- A Distributed Recording System for High Quality MBone Archives.- Reducing Replication of Data in a Layered Video Transcoder.- Providing Interactive Functions through Active Client-Buffer Management in Partitioned Video Multicast VoD Systems.- A Multicast Transport Protocol for Reliable Group Applications.- Efficient Buffering in Reliable Multicast Protocols.- Native IP Multicast Support in MPLS.- Cyclic Block Allocation: A New Scheme for Hierarchical Multicast Address Allocation.- Survivable ATM Group Communications Using Disjoint Meshes, Trees, and Rings.- The Direction of Value Flow in Connectionless Networks.- Techniques for Making IP Multicast Simple and Scalable.- Watercasting: Distributed Watermarking of Multicast Media.- MARKS: Zero Side Effect Multicast Key Management Using Arbitrarily Revealed Key Sequences.- Multicast Service Differentiation in Core-Stateless Networks.