A PROGRAMMABLE TRANSPORT ARCHITECTURE WITH QOS GUARANTEES

The emergence of distributed multimedia applications exhibiting signif icantly more stringent quality of service requirements than convention al data-oriented applications calls for new transport protocols with d ifferent characteristics to coexist and be integrated within single ap plications. The different delivery requirements posed by these diverse multimedia applications often imply the need for highly customized pr otocol implementations. Hence, application developers are faced with t he threat of code obsolescence caused by the development of even newer delivery techniques. We present an object-oriented transport architec ture that allows for dynamically binding a variety of protocol stacks on a per-call basis. By binding protocol stacks together, the special needs of the application can be met without the need to rewrite the co de. This differs significantly from the traditional transport architec ture which assumes preinstalled transport protocol stacks that cannot be customized. To illustrate some of the advantages provided by the ar chitecture, we describe the transport component of the first reference implementation of the ISO MPEG-4 Delivery Multimedia Integration Fram ework and demonstrate how quickly it was implemented in our framework.