How to design and implement a reliable multicast protocol that can handle the thousands of members of the Internet is a difficult challenge for network designers. An efficient, scaleable and reliable IMP is required to provide good quality service for a wide range of applications residing in different types of networks and machines. The crucial property of the IMP would be to provide quality of service of multicast ordering and reliability. This proposal focuses on a new algorithm design of IMP for a large number of sites in the Internet. It will investigate the following key issues of IMP to fit the Internet environment:

1. logical structure of groups;
2. total ordering;
3. atomic delivery and packet loss;
4. group reconfiguration;
5. multiple group IMP; and
6. prototyping.