A method of clustering communication nodes based on network attributes such as network delays and forwarding capacity; on communication interest attributes; and on application attributes such as quality of service preferences/constraints in providing communications between users and application servers. A multi-attribute communication feature vector is formed. That vector is comprised of network attributes, communication interests attributes, and quality of service requirements and is used to form efficient group communication mechanisms for distributed collaborative applications. Then the multi-attribute communication feature vectors are clustered. The clustering methods for multi-type attribute feature vectors are: iterative clustering using a generalized distance space with normalized attribute subspace metrics; fusion clustering, and nested clustering.