[Other Papers] [Briefing Package]
Title: Webcanal: Multicast Based Push Speaker: Tie Liao, INRIA, France Abstract: Current push, called "smart pull" by some people, is undergoing a number of serious problems such as high network bandwidth consumption and lack of interoperability. These problems hinder the widespread deployment of the push technology. There is a decoupling of the networking technologies and the application model. The right way for doing push should be the deployment of IP multicast. However, before a switch to the "true push", we have to overcome a number of obstacles, among which the most important would be: - the MBONE accessibility. - reliable multicast. - standards. These problems are addressed through the presentation of a R/D project, webcanal, which is considered as an effort to design and experiment an architecture for multipoint information distribution systems. By webcanal we intend to build a general platform for information distribution on the Internet. On this platform, different kinds of push applications could be built in a standard way and with guaranteed interoperability. In my presentation, I will describe our point of view on the key issues regarding multicast based push and the work already and being carried out in our project.