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The local Message Bus (Mbus) was a light-weight message-oriented coordination protocol for group communication between application components. The Mbus provided automatic location of communication peers, subject based addressing, reliable message transfer and different types of communication schemes. The protocol used link-local IP multicast or directed unicast communication, providing a general purpose inter-process and local area coordination infrastructure. Intended applications included decomposed teleconferencing end-points, service discovery in local area networks, and coordination between end-systems. The Mbus fit into the design space occupied by the LBL Conference Bus, CCCP, Pattern Matching Multicast in MInT, D-Bus, Jini, and mDNS.
The Mbus protocol specification has been published by the IETF as RFC 3259.
Our paper describing the Mbus was presented in the workshop on Component-based Groupware at the CSCW 2000 conference in Philadelphia.
Work on the Mbus was supported by the EU FP4 MERCI and MECCANO projects. The Mbus protocol was implemented in the Robust-Audio Tool and the UCL release of the vic video conferencing tool.