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COST 264 Objectives
The main objective of this action will be to provide a forum where
researchers and industrials active in this area will participate.
Complementary experimentations will be conducted to enable and
understand multimedia group communications that will be available on
various networks in the future. These activities will contribute to
leverage European research in this domain as well as to the development
of enhanced architectures at the International level.
The action will be divided into two complementary parts of similar
importance, that together will enable the action to meet its goals :
- Infrastructure and dissemination.
- Research and experimentation.
The " infrastructure and dissemination " part aims at cooperation and
coordination between research actors to improve the existing
infrastructure to support group communication (principally the Mbone).
The infrastructure activity is a pre-requisite to the scientific
cooperation. It will allow experimentation with the applications and
mechanisms developed by participants, as well as providing a way to
support an effective dissemination of the work. This activity will:
- Create a multicast group on the Mbone (named the "Costbone")
dedicated to this action and to the European networking research
community.
- Coordinate work to improve the infrastructure based on the
participant's contribution.
- Define and support an homogeneous environment in the sites
connected on the Costbone to fulfill the requirements for distributed
experimentation,
- Disseminate the action activity through euro-seminars and other
forms (multiparty conferencing, telephony, Collaborative work, etc.).
The " research and experimentation " part is devoted to cooperation
between participants in the areas of multicast, multipeer, group
communication and relevant applications. This is an area of utmost and
strategic importance for research and industry. Multimedia group
communication will leverage industry competitivity and provide new tools
for cooperative work. This activity will:
- Bring together European teams already involved in the area of group
communication to discuss research activities, identify key issues and
potential solutions, and therefore benefit from cross-fertilization.
- Invite people from industry to whom these technologies will be very
important in the near future, to describe their needs and expectations.
- Evaluate the work carried out in the different standardization or
project bodies and provide feedback as users and researchers to the
standardization groups (in particular to IETF).
- Discuss solutions through meetings (including electronic meetings over
the Costbone).
- Experiment new multipeer transmission control algorithms and
mechanisms designed by the action's participants. Evaluate
experimentally the proposed solutions on the available infrastructure
(the Costbone).
- Provide a framework for the exchange of research scientists and
students in order to improve the level of collaboration between research
groups.
Both activities are tightly coupled and converge to :
A technical report that describes the progress made in the area of group
communication thanks to the action activity. This report will be
published as a book or as a special issue of a technical journal .
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