A Middleware Service for Real-Time Push-Pull Communications

: Current and emerging real-time and multimedia applications like multi-party collaboration, internet telephony and distributed command control systems require the exchange of information over distributed and heterogeneous nodes. Multiple data types including voice, video, sensor data, real-time intelligence data and text are being transported widely across today's information, control and surveillance networks. All such applications can benefit enormously from middleware, operating system and networking services that can support QoS guarantees, high availability, dynamic reconfigurability and scalability. In this paper, we propose a middleware layer called a "Real-Time Push-Pull Communications Service" to easily and quickly disseminate real-time information across heterogeneous nodes. Push-Pull Communications is an extension of the real-time publisher/subscriber model [4], and represents both "push" (data transfer initiated by a sender) and "pull" (data transfer initiated by a receiv..