An architecture for real-time multimedia communication systems

A multimedia communication system includes both the communication protocols used to transport the real-time data and the distributed computing system (DCS) within which any applications using the protocols must execute. The architecture presented attempts to integrate these communications protocols with the DCS in a smooth fashion in order to ease the writing of multimedia applications. Two issues are identified as being essential to the success of this integration: the synchronization of related real-time data streams, and the management of heterogeneous multimedia hardware. The synchronization problem is tackled by defining explicit synchronization properties at the presentation level and by providing control and synchronization operations within the DCS which operate in terms of these properties. The heterogeneity problems are addressed by separating the data transport semantics (protocols themselves) from the control semantics (protocol interfaces)