Partially-Ordered, Partially-Reliable Transport
         Services for Multimedia Applications

              Paul D. Amer, Professor
            Computer Science Department
              University of Delaware
              Newark, Delaware, USA

Partially-ordered (PO) transport quality of service (QoS)
was introduced by Prof. Amer in Internet RFC1693.  This QoS
allows an application to define an end-to-end delivery order to
the receiver that is less constrained than a total order
(as provided by TCP) and more controlled than no order (as
provided by UDP).  Partially-ordered QoS has since been
extended to include partially-reliable (PR) QoS features. 
These features allow an application to control the degree
of loss that the transport layer provides and also provide
some coarse synchronization and graceful degradation
services that neither TCP nor UDP provide.  

With ARO and NSF support, the University of Delaware
has been designing and evaluating innovative transport
protocols to provide PO/PR services.  This talk will discuss
an implementation of one such protocol called Partial Order
Connection version 2 - POCv2.  An example application, remote
multimedia document retrieval, will be used to demonstrate why
POCv2's QoS is most appropriate particularly in lossy
packet-switched network environments, i.e., the Internet.


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Autobiography:
Paul D. Amer  received his PhD in CIS in 1979 from The Ohio
State University.  Since 1979, he has been at the University
of Delaware where currently he is a professor of computer science.

Other experience:
  1978 - 1987, part-time Research Scientist at National Bureau of
Standards in Wash, DC.  
  1985-1986, sabbatical year at the Agence de l'Informatique in Paris
contributing to the development of Estelle, now ISO International
Standard 9074.
  1992-1993, sabbatical year at the Laboratoire d'Automatique et d'Analyse
des Systemes (LAAS) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
(CNRS) in  Toulouse, France working on a partial order transport service.