A STICKY CONFERENCE CONTROL PROTOCOL

Wide-area interactive conferencing has become a lively issue to the In ternet community and to many other network research groups as well, In this paper, we describe a Sticky conference control protocol that has been deployed for n-way video-conferencing on the worldwide Defense S imulation Internet, It differs from other well-known conference protoc ols in its lack of shared state and explicit modeling of a conference membership as a (possibly incomplete) directed graph, rather than assu ming full connectivity, It also takes an unusual 'late-binding' approa ch to resource and bandwidth negotiation, We describe the architecture and mechanisms of the Sticky protocol, then contrast it with the CCP and Light-Weight Session conference control protocols.