Subject: Draft paper on agreement algorithm

From: [email-masked] (Abel Weinrib)
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 1994 17:34:29 -0800

Scott Shenker spoke at the last IETF on a general framework for managing
shared teleconferencing state.  We now have a draft document on this work.
You can ftp it from thumper.bellcore.com:pub/abel/agree.ps

We are very interested in comments on this draft.  Perhaps we can have a
discussion during the second mmusic meeting about how this work relates to
that described in the document on CCCP that was announced to this mailing
list a couple of days ago.

Looking forward to seeing many of you next week.

                        --Abel Weinrib

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                                Abstract

In recent years there has been dramatic progress on the enabling
technologies for workstation-based multimedia teleconferencing
applications.  We expect that such applications will soon become an
important component of many future social and business interactions.
Teleconferencing applications have aspects of their state, such as
membership, encryption, and media encoding, that are under joint control.
Much of this state is {\em ephemeral}, in that it is of importance only for
the duration of a session, and does not have importance outside of the
session itself.  In this paper we focus on the specification and
realization of policies for managing this shared ephemeral teleconferencing
state.  We first define a broad family of policies which has three
dimensions: initiation, voting, and consistency.  We then consider three
different communication models,
and for each model present a mechanism which implements this family of policies.