A. El-Sayed, V. Roca, L. Mathy,
``A survey of Proposals for an Alternative Group Communication Service'',
IEEE Network magazine, Special issue on ``Multicasting: An Enabling
Technology'', January/February 2003. 

URL:
	http://www.comsoc.org/pubs 


%================================ ABSTRACT =====================================
 As the Internet is expected to better support multimedia applications, new 
 services need to be deployed. One of them is the group communication
 service for one-to-many or many-to-many data delivery. 
 After more than a decade of important research and development efforts, the
 deployment of multicast routing in the Internet is far behind expectations.
 Therefore a first motivation for an alternative group communication service
 is to bypass the lack of native IP multicast routing.
 Although less efficient and scalable than native multicast routing,
 such alternative services are suitable for purpose.
 A second possible motivation is to go beyond the limitations of classic
 multicast routing for very specific working environments.
 In this article we identify, classify and discuss some of these alternative
 approaches.
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