The multiparty conference management protocol (MCMP) is an end-to-end distributed session/transport level protocol intended for group management of desktop conferencing applications. This paper describes the MCMP conference setup algorithms and proves that they meet specified correctness properties. MCMP sets up control channels for use in exchanging control information while the conference is in progress. The logical topology used is a completely interconnected mesh, MCMP always provides best effort services in cases of failures. Correctness properties guaranteed upon termination of the protocol include connectivity, validity, uniqueness, and consistency of local views. Application control information that can be exchanged using the control channels include resource negotiation and subconferencing.

The paper describes the characteristics and performance of the 16-CAP transmission scheme that has been chosen by the Technical Committee of the ATM Forum as the ATM LAN physical layer interface standard at 51.84 Mb/s for category 3 unshielded-twisted-pair (UTP) wiring. The two most attractive features of the 16-CAP transceiver are its capability of operating in the presence of multiple users in a voice-grade UTP cable and the straightforward way in which it can provide scalability to lower speeds. It is also shown in the paper how the carrierless AM/PM (CAP) modulation scheme used for the ATM LAN standard can be utilized to provide substantially higher data rates than 51 Mb/s when there is only one user in a cable. Under this condition, data rates up to 155 Mb/s can be achieved over category 3 wiring and significantly higher rates can be achieved over high-performance category 5 wiring.>

The authors examine the data transfer phase of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to identify complex processing elements, where complexity is measured in terms of instruction counts. The objective is to reduce the complexity and improve the performance of TCP in a high speed networking environment, especially for bulk data transfer. It is found that most of the complexity is due to incomplete state information exchange with the peer, and to adapting to network dynamics using the current congestion control scheme. By partitioning of the protocol functionality into data and control information processing, along with the use of a rate based congestion control scheme, the complexity can be reduced by up to 67%. Performance can be further enhanced by running the new properly partitioned TCP in parallel as well as by simplifying the logic associated with some TCP timers.>