Guaranteed Quality of Service For Efficient Multiparty Communication

Communication of multimedia data among multiple parties can be costly in terms of the 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 in devising 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 resources needed by real-time protocols to offer guranteed performance networking by exploiting the interaction patterns typical of multimedia applications such as teleconferencing and teleeducation.