IGCP: A Platform for Interactive Communication in Groupware Applications

This paper presents the Interactive Group Communication Platform (IGCP), a high-level framework designed to provide groupware application developers with an efficient tool for realization of interactive, multipoint collaboration across a heterogeneous network environment. The concept of the platform has been depicted, one of its most important elements is a scalable data stream whose volume can be progressively adjusted along the path between a sender and a group of receivers. The strong temporal requirements have been met by using a number of advanced mechanisms, such as application-level congestion detection and specialized message compressors installed on end nodes or on intermediate, infrastructural nodes. IGCP also offers typical groupware services such as session state management and floor control. The presented discussion on the usefulness of various transport protocols and other network mechanisms shows that the contemporary Internet infrastructure does not offer sufficient support for this class of applications. IGCP has been implemented in the Microsoft .Net framework using ICE middleware and its usefulness has been proved in a real application - the TeleDICOM 2.0 teleconsultation tool.