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Research : Message Bus

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.

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.