A programmable transport architecture with QoS guarantees

The emergence of distributed multimedia applications exhibiting significantly more stringent quality of service requirements than conventional data-oriented applications calls for new transport protocols with different characteristics to coexist and be integrated within single applications. The different delivery requirements posed by these diverse multimedia applications often imply the need for highly customized protocol implementations. Hence, application developers are faced with the threat of code obsolescence caused by the development of even newer delivery techniques. We present an object-oriented transport architecture that allows for dynamically binding a variety of protocol stacks on a per-call basis. By binding protocol stacks together, the special needs of the application can be met without the need to rewrite the code. This differs significantly from the traditional transport architecture which assumes preinstalled transport protocol stacks that cannot be customized. To illustrate some of the advantages provided by the architecture, we describe the transport component of the first reference implementation of the 150 MPEG-4 Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework and demonstrate how quickly it was implemented in our framework