Modeling real time applications in distributed environment

Real-time interactive group communication using voice media is discussed. The authors developed a distributed audio conferencing system on top of a conventional system-design support platform that included Sun SparcStations, Unix, IP protocol, and Ethernet. In the study, Petri nets have proved to be an excellent modeling tool for designing such a workstation-based real-time voice conferencing system, for predicting and evaluating the network performance, and in understanding the concurrency issues involved in distributed and continuous audio media communication on Ethernet. Stochastic Petri nets have provided insight into different kinds of delay parameters associated with such a real-time system. The modeling, development, performance, and concurrency issues related to the distributed real-time audio conference server are discussed