MULTIPOINT COMMUNICATION - A SURVEY OF PROTOCOLS, FUNCTIONS, AND MECHANISMS

Group communication supports information transfer between a set of par ticipants. It is becoming more and more relevant in distributed enviro nments, For distributed or replicated data, it provides efficient comm unication without overloading the network. For some types of multimedi a applications, it is the only way to control data transmission to gro up members. This paper surveys protocol functions and mechanisms for d ata transmission within a group, from multicast routing problems up to end-to-end multipoint transmission control, We provide a bibliography which is organized by topic, This paper is intended to introduce this special issue with the necessary background on recent and ongoing res earch.