Configurable Middleware for Multimedia Collaboration Applications

Modern collaboration applications have a multitude of QoS requirements. Depending on the application module, such as messaging, collaborative modeling, or multimedia conferencing, the networking requirements are different. Such applications can greatly benefit from middleware which allows for configuring and using multiple communication stacks from within the same application. This enables applications to employ the best middleware configuration for each communication task. In this paper we demonstrate how to optimize for reliability, low latency, and throughput using configurable protocol stacks. We have implemented a prototype and evaluated the positive effects of customizing the protocol stack in three different use case scenarios.