Multipoint communication: A survey of protocols, functions, and mechanisms

Group communication supports information transfer between a set of participants. It is becoming more and more relevant in distributed environments, For distributed or replicated data, it provides efficient communication without overloading the network. For some types of multimedia applications, it is the only way to control data transmission to group members. This paper surveys protocol functions and mechanisms for data transmission within a group, from multicast routing problems up to end-to-end multipoint transmission control, We provide a bibliography which is organized by topic, This paper is intended to introduce this special issue with the necessary background on recent and ongoing research.