Object-oriented design of adaptive multicast communications

Multicast (group) communications have been widely recognized by current research and industry. Multicast is very useful for various network applications such as distributed (replicated) database, video/audio conference, information distribution and server locations etc. But design and implementation of such multicast communication systems in networks are complicated tasks, especially when quality of service (QoS) of applications such as real time and reliability are desired. In order to quickly design and implement multicast communication, good tools are crucial and must be facilitated. The paper presents a novel object oriented (OO) QoS driven approach for the quick design and prototyping of multicast communication systems under certain QoS requirements, for multicast message transmission and receptions such as real time, total ordering, atomicity and fault tolerance etc.