Th. Peuker
-
Nov.
10,
1997
RTP for Java
Continuous media, namely video and sound, are beginning to conquer computer networks. The possibility of transmitting such media over networks facilitates new kinds of distributed applications, such as digital television broadcasting, teleconferencing, or multimedia information systems.All these applications, collectively called multimedia applications, require the transmission of multimedia data streams. The inherent real-time constraints of multimedia data place new demands on network systems and the employed transport protocols.
This thesis investigates into the general and time-related characteristics of multimedia data streams and multimedia applications. Furthermore, it reviews several techniques, which have been developed recently by the Internet community for the transmission of time-critical data. In particular, the Internet Integrated Services Architecture, the Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP), and the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) receive special attention.
Distributed multimedia applications require a design that emphasises flexibility, modularity, expandability, and efficiency. The object-oriented paradigm offers proven methods for the design and implementation of complex applications. The thesis summarises several object-oriented approaches to multimedia application designs, in general, and specifically demonstrates how network communication is integrated into object-oriented multimedia applications.
Based on these studies, the thesis proposes an object-oriented architecture for the transmission of multimedia data streams. The architecture is intended to serve as a communication framework for distributed multimedia applications.
This architecture has also been implemented as part of this thesis, using the Java programming language and incorporating the RTP.
The mmstream implementation successfully verifies the conceptual suitability of
the architectural design.
The implementation source code as well as the thesis (supervised by Erich Meier) are available for download (HTML, PostScript (~815KB), or gzipped PostScript (~215KB)).