Session management for distributed multimedia applications

The Touring Machine system is a software infrastructure that supports the development and deployment of distributed multimedia applications in a public network environment. This paper describes the design of the session management service in the Touring Machine system (Arango, 1993). A session is a temporary confederation of one or more parties for the negotiated and cooperative sharing of resources. The session management service is useful for a large class of distributed multimedia applications (such as desktop conferencing, shared editing, and distance education) to create and manage multiple concurrent multi-party, multimedia communication sessions using a common set of protocols and mechanisms. Although the communication models implemented by these applications are very different from each other, the mechanics of adding and deleting session members, and of setting up the transport topology have much in common. Rather than re-inventing and re-implementing the same mechanism for each application, it is desirable for the underlying infrastructure to provide a session management service that can be customized to be used by all applications to manage multi-party, multimedia communication sessions