A Characterization of
                        Multi-Party Interactive
                        Multimedia Applications




                 Clemens Szyperski and Giorgio  Ventre

                            The Tenet Group
                International Computer Science Institute
                                  and
                       Computer Science Division
                          Department of EECS
                  University of California, Berkeley

             e-mail: {szyperski,ventre}@icsi.berkeley.edu

                High Performance Network Research Report

                             February 1993

                                Abstract

     This document tries to define and characterize a class of  applica-
tions  called  Multi-Party  Interactive Multimedia (MIM), for which many
examples are given. This  class  includes  applications  such  as  CSCW,
teleconferencing, and remote education; its consideration in this report
is based on the observation that MIM applications are both important and
representative for the area of high-performance real-time communication.
Purely functional criteria are used to capture the MIM class, i.e.  ones
that  are  not  related  to any particular way of implementation.  Thus,
future directions are sketched that give some indications on what a net-
work  architecture will need to provide, in order to effectively support
such applications.