Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A user-centric network communication broker for multimedia collaborative computing

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The development of collaborative multimedia applications today follows a vertical development approach, where each application is built on top of low-level network abstractions such as the socket interface. This stovepipe development process is a major inhibitor that drives up the cost of development and slows down the innovation pace of new generations of communication applications. In this paper, we propose a network communication broker (NCB) that provides a unified higher-level abstraction for the class of multimedia collaborative applications. We demonstrate how NCB encapsulates the complexity of network-level communication control and media delivery, and expedites the development of applications with various communication logics. We investigate the minimum necessary requirements for the NCB abstraction. We identify that the concept of user-level sessions involving multiple parties and multiple media, is critical to designing a reusable NCB to facilitate next-generation multimedia communications. Furthermore, the internal design of NCB decouples the user-level sessions from network-level sessions, so that the NCB framework can accommodate heterogeneous networks, and applications can be easily ported to new network environments. In addition, we demonstrate how the extensible and self-managing design of NCB supports dynamic adaptation in response to changes in network conditions and user requirements.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Access Grid, http://www.accessgrid.org/

  2. Aksit M, Choukair Z (2003) Dynamic, adaptive and reconfigurable systems overview and prospective vision. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing SystemsWorkshops (ICDCSW’03), May

  3. Blair GS, Coulson G, Robin P, Papathomas M (1998) An architecture for next generation middleware, Middleware’98, September

  4. Bond GW, Cheung E, Hal Purdy K, Zave P, Ramming JC (2004) An open architecture for next-generation telecommunication services. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology IV(1):83–123

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Chen WK, Hiltunen MA, Schlichting RD (2001) Constructing adaptive software in distributed systems. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21), pp. 635–643, April

  6. Deng Y, Sadjadi SM, Clarke P, Zhang C, Hristidis V, Rangaswami R, Prabakar N (2006) A communication virtual machine. The 30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (IEEE COMPSAC), September

  7. Dey AK, Abowd GD (2000) The context toolkit: Aiding the development of context-aware applications. The 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), June

  8. Fide S, Jenks SF (2007) A middleware approach for pipelining communications in clusters. Cluster Comput 10:409–424

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Google, Google Talk. http://www.google.com/talk/

  10. Handley M, Schulzrinne H, Schooler E, Rosenberg J (1999) SIP: session initiation protocol, RFC 2543, March

  11. Hiltunen MA, Schlichting RD (1996) Adaptive distributed and fault-tolerant systems. International Journal of Computer Systems Science and Engineering 11:125–133

    Google Scholar 

  12. ITU-T Recommendation H.323v.4 “Packet-based multimedia communications systems”, November 2000

  13. Jabber, http://www.jabber.org/

  14. JAIN-SIP. https://jain-sip.dev.java.net/

  15. Java Media Framework (JMF). http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/media/jmf/

  16. Juszczyk L, Dustdar S (2008) A middleware for service-oriented communication in mobile disaster response environments, 6th International Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-Hoc Computing (MPAC). 9th ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference 2008. December

  17. Kephart JO, Chess DM (2003) The vision of autonomic computing. IEEE Computer 36:41–50

    Google Scholar 

  18. Kortuem G et al. (2001) When peer-to-peer comes face-to-face: collaborative peer-to-peer computing in mobile ad-hoc networks. In Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P2001), August

  19. Lennox J, Schulzrinne H (2003) A protocol for reliable decentralized conferencing”, ACM NOSSDAV

  20. McKinley PK, Padmanabhan UI, Ancha N, Sadjadi SM (2003) Composable proxy services to support collaboration on the mobile internet. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 713–726, June

  21. McKinley PK, Sadjadi M, Kasten EP, Cheng BHC (2004) Composing adaptive software. IEEE Computer, 56–64, July

  22. Pereiral FMQ, Valente MTO, Bigonhal RS, Bigonhal MAS (2006) Arcademis: a framework for object oriented communication middleware development. Software: Practice and Experience 36(5):495–512

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Polycom, http://www.polycom.com/

  24. Radvision, http://www.radvision.com/

  25. Rosenberg J, Weinberger J, Huitema C, Mahy R (2003) STUN — Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Through Network Address Translators (NATs), RFC 3489, March

  26. Schmidt DC (1993) The ADAPTIVE communication environment: an object-oriented network programming toolkit for developing communication software. Concurrency: Practice and Experience 5(4):269–286

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Schulzrinne H, Casner S, Frederick R, Jacobson V (2003) RTP: a transport protocol for real-time applications, RFC 3550, July

  28. Skype Limited, Skype developer zone. https://developer.skype.com/

  29. Sousa JP, Garlan D (2002) Aura: an architectural framework for user mobility in ubiquitous computing environments. In Proceedings of the third Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, pp. 29–43

  30. SUN, Java Telephony API, http://java.sun.com/products/jtapi/

  31. The Parlay Group, Parlay/osa specifications, http://www.parlay.org/en/specifications/

  32. van Renesse R, Birman KP, Hayden M, Vaysburd A, Karr D (1998) Building adaptive systems using Ensemble. Software Practice and Experience, vol. 28, August

  33. Zhang C, Sadjadi M, Sun W, Rangaswami R, Deng Y (2006) A user-centric network communication broker for multimedia collaborative computing. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Collaborative Computing, Atlanta, 2006

  34. Zhang J, Liu L, Ramaswamy L, Zhang G, Pu C (2007) A utility-aware middleware architecture for decentralized group communication applications, ACM/IFIP/USENIX 8th International Middleware Conference (MIDDLEWARE-2007), November

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Juniper Networks, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

    Chi Zhang

  2. School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

    S. Masoud Sadjadi & Raju Rangaswami

  3. Amazon, Seattle, WA, USA

    Weixiang Sun

  4. College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Yi Deng

Authors
  1. Chi Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. S. Masoud Sadjadi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Weixiang Sun
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Raju Rangaswami
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Yi Deng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chi Zhang.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Zhang, C., Sadjadi, S.M., Sun, W. et al. A user-centric network communication broker for multimedia collaborative computing. Multimed Tools Appl 50, 335–357 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0385-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0385-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation