Multimedia intra-group communication protocol

In distributed applications, a group of multiple application processes have to send and receive multimedia messages by using the high-speed network. The multimedia message at the application level is decomposed into multiple smaller packets which are transmitted in the communication system. In this paper, we discuss the atomic and ordered delivery of messages at the application level rather than the system level. In some multimedia applications, the application processes do not mind if some packets are lost and in what order packets from different processes are received. The application process specifies the minimum receipt ratio /spl epsiv/ (/spl les/1) showing how many percentages of whole data in each message the destination processes have to be received at least. The communication system delivers the packets to the destinations in the group so as to satisfy the receipt ratio /spl epsiv/. The protocol is based on the fully distributed control scheme, i.e. no master controller.