Reliable multicast service with IPv6 support: synchronous collaborative applications

The world wide web (WWW) already accounts for more Internet network traffic than any other application, including email and simple file transfer. It is also a collaborative technology in a weak sense of the word - it allows people to share information. Synchronous collaboration is where an interactive activity is simultaneous and in real-time. Computer based synchronous collaborative systems like shared whiteboards, collaborative editor etc. are only beginning to emerge recently. These applications involving more than two users exchanging information, require multicast communication. Multicast communication is a transmission mode that is now supported by a variety of local and wide area networks. Multicasting enables multiparty communication across a wide area to sparsely distributed groups by minimizing the network load. Multicasting itself is one of the key technologies in the next generation of the Internet. This paper describes the technical issues from the aspect of multicast communication and its reliability in synchronous collaborative application.