Enhanced Communication Support for Networked Applications

Today communication support forms a key issue for almost all computer-driven applications. Enhanced networks as well as communication protocols and services are required in order to appropriately serve the emerging variety of applications. This holds for networked multimedia applications as well as for scientific applications. If scientific applications are implemented on workstation clusters, they typically need to deal with the same protocol stack as multimedia applications, i.e., with the Internet protocols. Although both types of applications may have different flavours, many commonalities exist with respect to their communication requirements. Examples include low communication overhead as well as scalable and efficient support of group communication.The paper gives a survey of enhanced communication support that is mainly targeted towards services and protocols for networked multimedia applications. Since efficiency of communication systems is very important, implementation techniques are also considered within this survey.