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Communication support for distributed collaborative applications

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Abstract

The development of distributed, multimedia, collaborative applications requires the resolution of communication issues such as concurrency control and temporal and causal synchronization of traffic over related data streams. Existing transport and/or session-layer protocols do not include the desired support for multistream, multipoint communication. In this paper, we propose new communication abstractions and mechanisms that facilitate the implementation of the necessary coordination and concurrency control semantics in a collaborative application. We propose a protocol suite called themultiflow conversation protocol (MCP) for the realization of these abstractions and describe its prototype implementation in an internetwork of workstations. The paper also describes our experience with the prototype and results of a performance evaluation.

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Correspondence to Raj Yavatkar.

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Yavatkar, R., Lakshman, K. Communication support for distributed collaborative applications. Multimedia Systems 2, 74–88 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01274182

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