Design Goals

The fundamental purpose of the set of classes and types constituting the architecture is to offer real-time transmission functionality and interfaces to network resource reservation mechanisms. The architecture is intended to serve as a universally suitable communication framework for distributed interactive multimedia applications, such as tele conferencing or computer supported cooperative work applications, or small-scale media-on-demand clients and servers.
In addition, the architecture comprises an object-stream--based structure for the multimedia data flow inside an application itself. This structure resembles the ideas of Husemann to some extent. However, the main issue of my work is the integration of network communication.

The two main design goals that substantially shaped the architecture, are:

• Uniform model of the intra-application data flow. To achieve a uniform model of the horizontal, intra-application data flow, the local representation of a remote medium source should fit in the local data flow in the same way as a local source. However, this abstraction must not entail any limits on efficiency.
• Access to network information and control over QoS mechanisms. The objects that represent the network access points must be equipped with interfaces, which grant access to the QoS monitoring and control facilities offered by the employed network techniques or transport protocols. Other information available from or through the network, such as data about the remote session participants, must be made accessible, too.

Naturally, general goals---such as modularity, easy expandability, or efficiency---must be kept in mind, too.