Emerging multimedia services and applications require various functions and facilities. One of the key features of multimedia applications with multi-party communication capability is end-to-end multicast transport functions. Based on this motivation, a set of ITU-T Recommendations have been developed on frameworks and protocols for group management and end-to-end multicast communications over IP multicast as well as non-IP multicast network environments. As a result of collaboration work with ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6, common text standards have been developed for multi-party communications and include ITU-T X.606-series | ISO/IEC 14476-series, ITU-T X.607-series | ISO/IEC 14476-series, ITU-T X.608-series | ISO/IEC 14476-series, ITU-T X.602 | ISO/IEC 16513, ITU-T X.603-series | ISO/IEC 16512-series, ITU-T X.604-series | ISO/IEC 24793-series, ITU-T X.605 | ISO/IEC 13252. These Recommendations will need to be continuously maintained and may be updated if further requirements from the market arise.

Various distributed and conversational multimedia services, such as IPTV, Digital signage, VoD, telepresence, personal broadcasting service, multimedia streaming and other emerging contents delivery services require efficient communications capability over various network environments and need to support enhanced contents such as AR/VR, UHD (4K, 8K). Distributed service networking protocols based on peer-to-peer (P2P) technology can be one of the useful solutions for supporting new emerging applications which require high performance and scalable communications capability. SG11 has been developing Recommendations on signalling architecture and protocols for managed P2P (MP2P) communications, which can be applied to end-to-end multimedia communications including video streaming and content distribution services. Standards development of protocols for hybrid P2P (HP2P) communications which consist of mesh-based P2P network and tree-based P2P network has also started and will be continued. HP2P communication protocols will provide efficient and flexible information distribution capabilities for IoT related services and Distributed Ledger Technology services. The set of Recommendations to be developed will provide solutions and guidelines for vendors and providers who want to implement and deploy distribution and delivery services for various types of content using P2P technologies.

Information centric network (ICN) has been and continues to be studied in many SDOs and notably in the Information Centric Research Group of IETF. Consideration is given to ICN technologies integrated into the existing Internet through Overlay deployments (ICN over IP), Underlay deployments (ICN islands within IP), or ICN in Virtualized IP infrastructure. These approaches are described in RFC 8763. Protocols and mechanisms for content discovery, distribution and delivery based on information centric network (ICN) technology in overlay, underlay and virtualised IP deployments will constitute very important emerging issues to support related requirement and capabilities of IMT-2020 network and beyond.

Recommendations under responsibility of this Question include: X.601, X.602, X.603, X.603.1, X.603.2, X.604, X.604.1, X.604.2, X.605, X.606, X.606.1, X.607, X.607.1, X.608 and X.608.1, X.609, X.609.1, X.609.2, X.609.3, X.609.4, X.609.5, X.609.6, X.609.7, X.609.8, X.609.9, X.609.10, Q.4100-Q.4139 (for protocols and signalling for P2P communications).