High performance networking with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) is one of the major challenges of the next decade. It mandates very important efforts to provide multimedia and multicast communications to wide area advanced users, because the limited mechanisms of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) cannot adequately support innovative distributed applications. Furthermore, future architectures will involve heterogeneous networks, as new satellite and terrestrial networks having sophisticated intelligent services. As a consequence, GCAP aims at developing for the future Internet two new end-to-end multicast and multimedia transport protocols, embedded in a new global architecture to provide a guaranteed QoS to advanced Multimedia Multipeer Multi-network applications. In order to rapidly experiment the proposed solutions, an efficient deployment of the communication software will be developed over an industrial IPv6 layer by using a programmable active network based technology.

Objectives:
The objectives of the project are:
- to define and evaluate a new end-to-end multicast transport protocol and a new end-to-end multimedia multicast transport protocol for supporting dedicated or specialised applications having guaranteed QoS requirements;
- to define and evaluate a new integrated global multi-network end-to-end architecture for supporting innovative multimedia and cooperative applications needing guaranteed Quality of Service;
- to propose a design approach to rapidly deploy and use such new protocols, that will be developed on top of the new QoS architecture based on IPv6 and DiffServ, by means of an active network based technology;
- to illustrate the feasibility and evaluate the potential of the advocated approach by conducting two experiments using the national research networks and their European interconnection.