An architecture for a tightly coupled conferencing system

Describes an architecture for a tightly coupled conferencing system on an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. In order to provide multicast service, we construct a multicast environment using a multicast address resolution server (MARS) and multicast servers (MCSs). The architecture provides conference control services which provide tight coordination of conference membership over the environment. The services are provided by a conference control server (CCS). We propose a secondary CCS in order to support fault tolerance. When the primary CCS fails to perform its service, the secondary CCS rakes over the control and continues conferencing without stopping