The goal of the project is to develop reliable group communication protocols which comply to the real-time constraints based on various networks ranging from high performance network such as ATM to lower band width networks for industrial automation. The research will develop a novel multicast communication protocol with minimized communication cost in guaranteeing reliability and their deadline.

The research will make contributions to network multicast design and have an impact on the research of distributed computing system in Hong Kong and Germany, in terms of both industrial applications (e.g. control systems) and in research and teaching. The project will establish a basis for further research of real-time distributed systems such as high availability systems through replicated real-time object groups and high performance systems using caching techniques in distributed shared memory designs.