The Mbone Whiteboard(Wb) is a remote conferencing application for shared drawing developed by the Network Research Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The LBNL WhiteBoard allows sites to do conferencing and sharing of documents in real-time. Documents can either be in PostScript format or plain ASCII text.
The LBNL WhiteBoard takes advantage of multicasting on the Mbone. Multicasting is one of the most effiecient methods for one-to-many communication. So that you may better understand the concept of multicasting on the Mbone, here is a brief description of two basic message types:
unicast: One host sends a single message that a single host
(one-to-one communication).
broadcast: One host sends a single message to entire network
(one-to-many).
Both of these message types have advantages and disadvantages.
The disadvantage of unicast is that to send the same message to multiple
hosts multiple unicasts must be made. The disadvantage of broadcasting
is that the entire network to which you are broadcasting receives your
message. This means each host on the network must process your message
even if the message is not for all the hosts. Multicasting is the
best of both worlds. With multicasting you can send a single message to
multiple hosts without sending the message to an entire network.
In fact you may send to any number of hosts on any number
of remote networks, without sending the message to every
host on that network. The Mbone is an abstraction that makes this possible.
You can find out more information about the Mbone from: http://www.serpentine.com/~bos/tech/mbone .
The following are some applications that take advantage of the mbone.
MBone Multimedia Applications :