Peter T. Kirstein
(Department of Computer Science - UCL)RESUMEN
This paper will concentrate on the activities in multicast, multimedia conferencing. Our past work is represented by the set of MICE/MERCI/MECCANO/ICECAR projects, and the piloting activities, which have grown alongside. An important conclusion of these activities is that active assistance is needed inside the network to provide the relevant Quality of Service, security and robustness, required to make the application viable and economically attractive.
While MECCANO is the last project we are doing directly in that series, we are now using that experience to go in two new directions. First, we are re-directing our activities into the fast-moving field of active networks - taking multimedia conferencing as the main application area. This is proving an excellent focus for many diverse research activities. Second, we are starting a new project in Wireless access to the Internet - again multimedia will be one of the drivers. Both these projects will be relying heavily on the emerging IPv6.
The talk will summarise the main activities and conclusions of the earlier work, and describe the general directions of our current activities.