Multicast communications have been widely applied to information distribution in the Internet. Differentiated service (DS) architecture is a well-known architecture for Internet quality-of-service (QoS) communications. DS is concerned with the scalability QoS for aggregate traffic/flows. This project targets the design of novel scalable delay control algorithms for multicast multimedia (real-time) flows and group QoS management in the DS architectures. More specifically, the project plans to

1. design short delay control algorithms and delay calculations for high-rate multicast multimedia flows and thus allow the delay bound to be well controlled when the flow rates are very high;
2. investigate the per-hop behaviour (PHB) and per-domain behaviour (PDB) to accommodate the multicast flows for the DS architectures with efficient resource utilization;
3. design the efficient real-time routing multicast protocol for inter- and intra DS domains with a delay control, resource allocation and group management; and
4. prototype the protocol into an experimental system and investigate the availability and fitness of the multicast multimedia communications in the current Internet.