Multimedia flow transmission policies for collaborative platform based on SOAP

Continuous media transmissions on collaborative platforms distributed over Internet introduces constraints like heterogeneity and security. It is why we propose a version of our cooperative application framework (CAliF), called CAliF Web, based on Web-services. SOAP has been chosen to transmit discrete flows because of its total integration to Web technologies. Nevertheless, performances of this middleware are not well-known for continuous flow transmissions. Video transmission tests we realized prove that three possible configurations for continuous media flow transmissions allow an efficient transmission of real-time data over the platform. The first one is based on RTSP which is the most efficient. But the disadvantage of this solution is that RTSP packets may be stopped by security policies over the Web. That is the reason why an HTTP streaming configuration is available too. Nevertheless, HTTP streaming does not include required mechanisms for regulation. SOAP offers solutions for streaming, called SOAP DIME. Since this configuration is based on SOAP over HTTP, chunks transmitted may not be stopped by most of security policies over Internet. It allows a better supervision for the whole platform. Tests we performed show that a regulation strategy has to be implemented too with this last configuration.