Configuring Function-based Communication Protocols for Multimedia Applications

Next generation communication systems must support diverse applications operating over high-performance local, metropolitan, and wide area networks. This paper describes a framework that contains a number of resource, language, and tool components for generating customized protocols to support diverse multimedia applications running in highperformance network environments. These components help to simplify the process of generating application-tailored communication protocols by automating many development and configuration steps. A collaborative distance learning application scenario is presented to motivate and demonstrate techniques used to compose function-based protocols that are customized for particular application requirements. In addition, the structure of a protocol resource pool that contains reusable protocol function building-blocks is also examined. 1 Introduction The communication requirements of emerging distributed applications are becoming increasingly diverse. There..