Transport-independent group and session management for group communications platforms

With more and more computers gradually changing from isolated, personal tools to networked workstations, group communications is an area of research which has received much attention recently. This paper focuses on a model and the architecture of a system which supports group communications by providing group and session management functionality. The system architecture is related to DNS or X.500, however avoids their complexity by focusing on group and session management and adding functionality where necessary. New functionality is needed for the dynamics of group communications (members of a connection may change over the lifetime of the connection) and increased complexity of relations which may be established between objects. A model is described which defines six object types which represent the relevant objects. Users and groups represent real world users and their relations. Sessions and flows describe ongoing group communications. Flow templates and certificates provide mechanisms for management and security issues. The architecture presented in this paper can be used for group and session management support within different group communications platforms. A description of the implementation as well as implementation results are given in the last section.