Multicast support for collaborative networking

Collaboration infrastructures are gradually coming of age, supporting real-time audio and video with a mixture of network core and edge based techniques to enable large-scale, multi-party communication. User participation in collaborative activities requires mechanisms to support dynamic group membership and maintenance of perpetually changing delivery topologies. In the past, multicast support has been studied within testbeds such as the MBone, and across overlay architectures. In this paper we tackle the problem of how network-native multicast can help to orchestrate the formation of virtual teams in group collaboration. We argue that user interaction can be understood as a series of constraint-driven information exchanges, for example by sharing objects based on access rights. A novel multicast protocol, limited core fix (LCF), is introduced to efficiently maintain multicast delivery trees among distributed work teams. LCF is a receiver-centric mechanism to support qualification-based multicast routing and performs more efficiently than comparable existing protocols