The Design of an Integrated Multimedia Communication Architecture

Robert Simon
Department of Computer Science
University of Pittsburgh

Friday, March 22, 1996
11 a.m. - 12 noon
Fuller Labs 320

The goal of my research is to provide a unified communication architecture to support distributed multimedia and computer-supported cooperative work applications. These applications communicate using a wide spectrum of data types, and because they range from simple point-to-point to mobile, multiparty interactive sessions, they have diverse connection management requirements. They also require that the underlying communication system provides reliable support for timing, throughput and synchronization.

In this talk, I will describe an integrated communication architecture designed to meet the above requirements. This architecture runs over an Integrated Services Network, the next generation of network architecture. Connection management occurs in the context of a novel process group model. This model provides a flexible way to manage a wide variety of media types and varying styles of collaborative real-time communication, and allows for the expression of the application's communication performance in terms of end-to-end delay and media synchronization. I will show how each group's performance requirements can be efficiently supported by network scheduling and routing algorithms. Routing within this architecture is performed using a hybrid stochastic optimization algorithm which substantially increases the network's ability to accept new multimedia connections.

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Last modified: Sep 27, 2006, 16:05 EDT