A User-Centric Network Communication Broker for Multimedia Collaborative Computing

Chi Zhang, S. Masoud Sadjadi, Weixiang Sun, Raju Rangaswami, Yi Deng
2006 2006 International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing  
The development of collaborative multimedia applications today follows a vertical development approach, which is a major inhibitor that drives up the cost of development and slows down the pace of innovation of new generations of collaborative applications. In this paper, we propose a network communication broker (NCB) that provides a unified higherlevel abstraction that encapsulates the complexity of networklevel communication control and media delivery for the class of multimedia
more » ... applications. NCB expedites the development of next-generation applications with diverse communication logics. Furthermore, NCB-based applications can be easily ported to new network environments. In addition, the self-managing design of NCB supports dynamic adaptation in response to changes in network conditions and user requirements. I. INTRODUCTION The convergence of various multimedia communications including voice, video and data over IP networks during the past decade has resulted in the emergence of a wide range of collaborative communication applications. However, the fast pace growth of innovations has been restrained by the stovepipe approach currently employed in application development. The development of domain-specific collaborative applications is both time-consuming and errorprone because the low-level communication services provided by the existing systems are primitive and often heterogeneous. Further, the underlying network configurations can also vary significantly which can reduce application portability. What is lacking is a shared and systematic approach to design across various collaborative applications. In [6], we introduced Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) that represents a paradigm shift in how a collaborative application is conceived and delivered. Through its layered architecture and model-driven engineering, CVM supports separation of major concerns such as modeling application-dependent collaboration logic, automatic generation of scripts to drive the collaboration logic, and the application-independent basic communication service reusable by various applications. In this paper, we focus on the basic application-independent communication service. We propose Network Communication Broker (NCB), a client-side middleware that encapsulates the networking complexity and heterogeneity of basic multimedia and multi-party communication for diverse upper-layer collaborative applications, ranging from a simple phone call and video conferencing to specialized communication
doi:10.1109/colcom.2006.361857 dblp:conf/colcom/ZhangSSRD06 fatcat:qgzj4umktndqjkoyupqguyh6ta