TRANSPORT-INDEPENDENT GROUP AND SESSION MANAGEMENT FOR GROUP COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORMS

With more and more computers gradually changing from isolated, persona l tools to networked workstations, group communications is an area of research which has received much attention recently. This paper focuse s on a model and the architecture of a system which supports group com munications by providing group and session management functionality. T he system architecture is related to DNS or X.500, however avoids thei r complexity by focusing on group and session management and adding fu nctionality where necessary. New functionality is needed for the dynam ics of group communications (members of a connection may change over t he lifetime of the connection) and increased complexity of relations w hich may be established between objects. A model is described which de fines six object types which represent the relevant objects. Users and groups represent real world users and their relations. Sessions and f lows describe ongoing group communications. Flow templates and certifi cates provide mechanisms for management and security issues. The archi tecture presented in this paper can be used for group and session mana gement support within different group communications platforms. A desc ription of the implementation as well as implementation results are gi ven in the last section.